Riverside Literature Series * 




ff 



Lincoln 



MOORES' 
Abraham Lincoln 

Boys and Girls 



Houghton Mifflin Co. 




Class _Z- U~& 7 
Gopyright^l?_ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 




ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN 18G4 



W<\z UitjersiDc literature £>mcsf 

THE LIFE OF 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

FOR BOYS AND GIRLS 

BY 

CHARLES W. I^OORES 

PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF SCHOOL COMMISSIONERS 
INDIANAPOLIS 

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 




HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

Boston : 4 Park Street ; New York : 85 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 378-388 Wabash Avenne 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Codes Received 

JAN 11 1909 

Copyritf.it tntry ^ 
CLASS £ ?__ XXc, No, 






COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY CHARLES W. MOORES 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



PREFACE 

Every American, over eight years old, ought to 
know the story of Abraham Lincoln's life. More than 
this, every American ought to know the best of Lin- 
coln's writings. Above all, every American ought to 
know the man, Abraham Lincoln. To give to children 
an understanding of his great life, an appreciation of 
the simplicity and purity of his literary style, and a love 
of the man, has been the purpose of this little book. 
The effort has been to do this without departing from 
the dignity which maturer minds demand in the pre- 
sentation of a personality that has won the love of us 
all. At the same time, the picture were incomplete 
without a portrayal of the humor that saved Lincoln 
from the madness to which the burden he carried 
might have driven him. 

The chapters which are not essentially political in 
their character, and therefore do not call for an elemen- 
tary knowledge of American history, have been found 
suited to the use of children in the fifth and sixth 
grades ; while, upon a thorough test, the whole book 
has proved well adapted for sight-reading in seventh 
and eighth grades. This test has shown the fulfillment 
of the author's purpose to give to the children a simple 
story of Lincoln's life, to stimulate a new interest in 
his writings, and to lead to a better understanding of 
Lincoln, the man. 

"A blend of mirth and sadness, smiles and tears, 
A quaint knight-errant of the pioneers : 
A homely hero born of star and sod ; 
A Peasant Prince ; a Masterpiece of God." 



CONTENTS 

I. The Lincolns settle in Kentucky ... 1 
II. Moving to Indiana 7 

III. A Backwoods Boyhood 13 

IV. A Strange Education 19 

V. The Land of Full-Grown Men . . .25 

VI. Lawyer and Lawmaker 32 

VII. Marriage and Congress 38 

VIII. Riding the Circuit 45 

IX. The Republican Party is Born . . .52 

X. The Debates with Douglas ... 59 

XL The Nomination 68 

XII. The Election 77 

XIII. The Presidency 85 

XIV. War Begins 93 

XV. A People's Sorrow 100 

XVI. President Lincoln at Home . . . 107 

XVII. High Tide 115 

XVIII. Peace 123 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Abraham Lincoln in 1864 .... Frontispiece 

The Boy Lincoln reading by the Light of the Fire 22 - 

Lincoln in 1860 . .74/ 

Lincoln's Cabinet 88 ' 

Lincoln and Tad 110^ 

Lincoln with his Generals at Antietam . . . 118 /" 



THE LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
FOR BOYS AND GIRLS 

CHAPTEE I 

THE LINCOLNS SETTLE IN KENTUCKY 

On the eastern slope of the Allegheny Mountains, 
not far from the western border of Virginia, was the 
farm of Abraham Lincoln, grandfather of President 
Lincoln. This elder Lincoln was one of a family of 
Pennsylvania Quakers, who about the time George 
Washington was born had settled in Virginia. He had 
prospered and had become a man of influence. Doubt- 
less because he was a Quaker he had not joined Wash- 
ington's army, although he had a younger brother who 
was an officer in the Virginia troops. 

The Revolutionary War had been going on for five 
years and was now nearing its close. Of the soldiers 
who had often felt the thrill that comes to those who 
hear the sound of fife and drum and bugle, many 
were beginning to hear the call of the frontier beyond 
the mountains, which Washington in his boyhood had 
explored. As their time of service expired, it was but 
natural that these hardy veterans should see in the 
unsettled lands to the westward a field rich in adven- 
ture and tempting in its rewards. From Virginia the 
line of travel to this land of promise lay southwest- 
erly, along the eastern slope of the Alleghenies, up the 
Shenandoah Valley, directly past the Lincoln farm in 



2 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Rockingham County, to the Cumberland Gap, and 
thence into the blue-grass country of Kentucky. 

As the endless caravan of canvas-covered wagons 
crept up the long, uneven slope on the Virginia side 
of the mountain range, hundreds of these venturesome 
pioneers passed the Lincoln farm, each company, no 
doubt, shouting to the less adventurous farmer, as they 
passed, a playful invitation to "sell out and come 
along." The elder Abraham Lincoln soon caught the 
spirit and joined the procession of emigrants that for 
the next fifty years was to take its winding course over 
the Wilderness Trail to the new "West. 

In 1780, Kentucky was a vast solitude, inhabited by 
wild beasts and a few scattered bands of Indians. Its 
trees and streams, its wild ravines and sweeping val- 
leys, lay before the wondering eyes of the emigrants as 
they came down the western slope of the great moun- 
tain barrier, — a picture of indescribable beauty, a 
picture in which there were no signs of human life, no 
houses, or schools, or churches, or bridges, or roads, or 
fields of grain. It was a paradise just as God's hand had 
left it. And yet the struggle that was going on there 
between Daniel Boone and his comrades in adventure 
and the few thousand savages who claimed this paradise 
as their own, gave to Kentucky the romantic name of 
"the dark and bloody ground," and offered promise 
of excitement and adventure, as w T ell as a free home, 
to all who might leave civilization behind them and 
brave the hardships of the Wilderness Trail. 

Abraham Lincoln the elder was counted a rich man 
when he took the seventeen thousand dollars that he 
got for his Virginia farm and bought from the govern- 
ment his three plantations in Kentucky. He became 
the owner of seventeen hundred acres in three tracts, 



THE LINCOLNS SETTLE IN KENTUCKY 3 

located in the Green River Valley, and near where 
Covington and Louisville are now. To the Louisville 
region, then a pathless wilderness, he brought his wife 
and children, the youngest of them two years old. Here 
he thought to find the fortune that his pluck and enter- 
prise would bring him. He was a friend of Daniel 
Boone, the Indian fighter, and his wife was a cousin of 
Boone. The Lincolns knew this land by its forbidding 
name, " the dark and bloody ground," but they were 
not afraid. The boys, no doubt, had their dreams of 
wild game, and of the scalping-knife and tomahawk, 
and they went into the unknown country full of faith 
in the fortune they were to win there. But the father's 
fortune was to die at the hands of the Indians, leaving 
his widow and five young children to make their way 
in the backwoods, with no one to care for them, with 
no chance for an education, and property from which 
they could not make their living. Whatever value their 
hundreds of acres had. depended on their being cleared 
and planted. The death of the father was the end of 
their great hopes, and to the Lincoln boys, who were 
scattered and put out to work wherever they might 
find a job. Kentucky was indeed a •• dark and bloody 
ground." The lands, such as they were, went by law 
to the eldest sou. Mordecai. 

The youngest son. Thomas, now six years old. became 
" a wandering laboring boy." and did the roughest kind 
of farm-work for such pay as men eared to give him. 
There were no schools where he could be taught, and 
he never learned to read or write until his wife taught 
him to scratch the letters of his name. He was a famous 
wrestler, and he was strong and brave. He could tell 
a funny story, and, in his happy-go-lucky way. he 
won everybody's good will. In his memorv he carried 



4 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

a picture, that he never lost, of the morning in the 
Kentucky clearing when the Indian killed his father, 
and his big brother Mordecai, fourteen years old, ran to 
the cabin for the rifle and shot his father's murderer. 

Thomas Lincoln learned the carpenter's trade, after 
a fashion, in the shop of Joseph Hanks. There he fell 
in love with his cousin, Nancy Hanks, whom he mar- 
ried — a tall, frail, but charming girl, with dark hair 
and dark, sparkling eyes. She was in many ways like 
her son. She read books when she could get them, par- 
ticularly the Bible, and she remembered what she read. 
She saw the funny side of life and she always enjoyed 
a good story. Yet she was often melancholy. She had 
not strength enough for the hardships she had to bear, 
and her short life had little happiness in it. 

The Lincolns began their housekeeping in a shed that 
afterward was used as a stable in an alley in the village 
of Elizabethtown. Here their little girl Nancy was 
born. " Tom " Lincoln was not a very good carpenter. 
In a community where the neighbors were as able as he 
to make the simple furniture and rude buildings they 
needed, it is not strange that he failed. He had followed 
no steady work since his father's death had thrown him 
upon the world, and while he was not discontented or 
idle, he was restless. So he gave up his trade and un- 
dertook farming. On Nolin's Creek, a dozen miles from 
where his friends and neighbors lived, and about sixty 
miles south of Louisville, he started to cut out the trees 
and build himself a house of logs. This was a one-room 
affair, with no door to keep out the cold and storm, and 
with no window to let in the light. There were open 
spaces between the logs that made its walls. The floor 
was the bare earth, pounded hard. In its one unfur- 
nished room there was no picture except that of the 



THE LINCOLNS SETTLE IN KENTUCKY 5 

barren patches of grass and weeds that the family could 
see through the open doorway. They slept on a bed of 
skins on the floor, and in the winter they sat shivering 
about the fireplace while Tom told stories or Nancy 
read aloud. Here, on February 12, 1809, their sec- 
ond child, Abraham Lincoln, was born. 

There are pictures of this log house on the Rock 
Spring Farm, near Nolin's Creek, but the house was 
torn down and the logs were used in other buildings 
long before the pictures were made. The American 
people have bought the farm and rebuilt the cabin out 
of some of the same logs, and mean to keep it always 
in memory of the great American who was born there 
a hundred years ago. 

The Lincolns soon found that they could not make 
a living on the place. So they moved again and built 
themselves another log cabin near Knob Creek, where 
the children and the tired mother were made more 
comfortable. Little Nancy was now old enough to go to 
school. They sent her, with her four-year-old brother 
for company, to be taught for a few months by an Irish 
wanderer, Zachariah Riney. Of him and their next 
teacher, Caleb Hazel, nothing is known except that 
they had no regular school, that they knew very little 
beyond the A, B, C's, and that they found in the little 
Lincoln boy a mind that was eager to learn and a dis- 
position to ask questions that must have interested 
them and taxed their patience greatly. We are told 
that in the evenings, while other children slept, Abe 
was bringing spicewood branches to make a blaze in 
the open fireplace so that his mother could read to him 
and help him puzzle out the letters by the firelight. 

The boy Lincoln was beginning to get an education. 
What he did not learn from the two wandering teach- 



6 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ers and from his mother, he picked up by asking ques- 
tions of every man that passed the house, and by 
listening to the preachers who rode horseback through 
the country and preached the gospel wherever they 
could find an audience by the wayside. The lad remem- 
bered all that he heard, and repeated to his mother 
and to the boys and girls of his acquaintance the sub- 
stance, and often the very words, of the sermons of 
these traveling preachers. The preachers knew scarcely 
more than their hearers, but they rode over hundreds 
of miles giving comfort and help to those that needed 
it, and keeping the frontier in touch with the rest of 
the world. One of them, David Elkin, was a frequent 
guest at the house, and won the admiration of the 
little backwoodsman, Abraham Lincoln. 

The Lincoln farm — if we may call it a farm, with 
its trees and heavy underbrush, its stumps and patches 
of rock — was barren enough, and the little family 
lived mainly on the wild animals that the father shot 
and the fish that they could catch in the creeks near 
by. One day Abraham, now about five years old, had 
been trying to make himself usefid and was coming 
home proudly swinging a fish from his line. Near the 
house he met an old soldier and, as he stopped to ask 
his usual questions of the man, there flashed upon his 
memory a command his mother had once given him, 
that he must always be kind to the soldiers. Instantly 
he gave the man his fish and went home empty-handed, 
disappointed that he had no fish to show, yet happy 
that he had done a patriotic act. 



CHAPTER II 

MOVING TO INDIANA 

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Ken- 
tucky was no longer a wilderness. Through Cumber- 
land Gap and down the Ohio River, thousands of fami- 
lies had been moving in from the East. Already the 
emigrants from Virginia and Maryland had brought 
with them a multitude of slaves who were to cut down 
the forests and plow the virgin soil and furnish for the 
new State the foundation for a slave civilization and 
a landed aristocracy. From the beginning the people 
of Kentucky were set apart in two classes. One of 
these classes consisted of those who could afford to 
have slaves to do their hard labor, and who in this 
way found time for themselves and their children to 
learn reading and writing. As the country became 
cleared and settled, these slave-owners were able to 
keep abreast of the times by means of travel and edu- 
cation. And because they had time and money and 
book-learning, they became the governing class in the 
new State. The other class was made up of those who 
were too poor to own slaves. They spent their days, 
axe in hand, cutting down the trees and getting the 
ground ready for the plow, and their nights in the 
heavy sleep that comes to those who work to the limit 
of their strength. When they needed food, the rod and 
gun brought them plenty of fish and game. Their boys 
and girls had to share in the endless labor as soon as 
they were old enough to do anything. The time of a 
boy of seven was too valuable to permit of his spend- 



8 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ing much of it in school. These two great classes, the 
owners of slaves and the " poor whites," had little in 
common. Wherever there were slaves the poor whites 
had small chance to get ahead in the world. 

Thomas Lincoln was too poor to be a slave-owner, 
and so long as he had to live in a community where 
slaves were doing without pay the only kind of work 
that he knew how to do, he had no reason to expect 
that he could get ahead. It is certain that slavery had 
something to do with his failures in Kentucky, and it 
was partly on account of slavery that he left Kentucky 
a few years later to settle in the free State of Indiana. 

A hundred miles to the northward was a newer 
country where there were no slaves, where the want of 
an education was no disadvantage to a man, and where 
there were no class distinctions between the rich and 
the poor. This new State had chosen for its great seal 
the picture of a pioneer, axe in hand, clearing the 
forest, with a buffalo in the background making way 
for the advance of civilization. What made it pecul- 
iarly the poor man's land of promise was that it had 
just written into its new constitution a law that should 
make every immigrant sure that he could earn his 
daily bread without competing with slave labor. In 
that constitution there was a sentence that in years to 
come was to exert its influence upon Abraham Lin- 
coln's public career. It read as follows : " As the hold- 
ing any part of the human creation in slavery . . . 
can only originate in usurpation and tyranny, no alter- 
ation of this constitution shall ever take place so as to 
introduce slavery ... in this State." 

In the summer of 1816, the year that Indiana came 
into the Union, Tom Lincoln sold his possessions, 
and building himself a raft, put his little fortune on 



MOVING TO INDIANA 9 

board and floated with it down the Rolling Fork and 
the Salt River to the Ohio ; and on dow» the Ohio to 
the month of Anderson's Creek on the Indiana side. 
Plunging fifteen miles into the forest, he found at 
Little Pigeon Creek the spot where he planned to 
build his new home. He walked back to the Kentucky 
cabin, and in the late fall brought his family across the 
country on the backs of two borrowed horses to the 
banks of the Ohio. Crossing the stream, he and his boy, 
Abe, began on the north shore to cut a road through 
the densely wooded forest of walnut and hickory toward 
their new home. In these woods the children saw many 
strange wild animals. Here was the home of the deer 
and the wild cat, the wolf and the bear. In the fallen 
leaves and undergrowth crept copperheads and rat- 
tlesnakes, while in the shadow of the trees they saw 
more birds than the little boy and girl could count. 
Stately, solitary cranes waded in the shallow water of 
the creek ; overhead were flocks of screaming green 
and yellow paroquets ; and in the more open places 
occasional wild turkeys were seen. No doubt the long 
ride on horseback across northern Kentucky, the first 
vision of the Ohio River as it swept between its scarlet 
and golden hillsides, and the first serious efforts with 
the pioneer's axe to open a way through which the 
horses could carry their goods to the new home, made 
impressions upon the memory of the little emigrant 
that he never wholly forgot. 

Years afterward, in telling about this boyhood home, 
Lincoln described it as " a wild region with many bears 
and other wild animals still in the woods." Speaking 
of this seven-year-old boy who had just come into In- 
diana, he said : " He settled in an unbroken forest, and 
the clearing away of surplus wood was the great task 



10 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ahead. Abraham, though very young, was large of his 
age, and had an axe put into his hands at once ; and 
from that time till within his twenty-third year he was 
almost constantly handling that most useful instru- 
ment." 

It was indeed the beginning of civilization in that 
part of Indiana. The nearest neighbors were some 
miles away, but they lent a helping hand whenever it 
was needed. The Lincoln s were utterly poor, but no 
poorer probably than the rest were. And all were rich 
in the spirit of neighborliness that made each new- 
comer welcome to the frontier community, and joined 
with him to build his cabin and protect his household 
from illness and want and danger of all kinds. 

The prospect of beginning life again in the thick 
woods, in November, without any sort of shelter and 
with no white settlement near by, must have fright- 
ened the young mother. But she had a husband who 
never lost his courage and a boy and a girl whom she 
loved dearly ; and loneliness was not a new experience 
to her. It was too late to build a real house to live 
in during their first winter, so they had to make out 
of saplings what was called a half-faced camp. Three 
of its four sides were of poles covered as well as possi- 
ble with dead leaves and brush, and the fourth side 
was open to the weather, except as it was protected 
by the bonfire that burned day and night before the 
opening. They had no matches ; so the fire must be 
watched and kept alive, or the woodsman must start 
another by a very slow process, with flint and steel. 
Indiana winters are sometimes bitter — that winter the 
temperature fell to eleven degrees below zero. Winds 
sweep fiercely along the Ohio valley and the snow 
drifts deep on the hillsides. We can picture the boy 



MOVING TO INDIANA 11 

and girl as they lay by night on the hard earth inside 
their half-faced camp, with their feet toward the blaz- 
ing fire, and enjoyed the dreamless sleep that their 
tired little bodies had earned, while Tom Lincoln, the 
father, listened to the howl of the storm and, hearing 
the cry of the wolf somewhere in the darkness, knew 
that he must keep up the fire or harm would come. 

Without near neighbors and without the ordinary 
comforts, the Lincolns found life a serious affair. There 
was no time for play and little chance for learning, as 
books were lacking, too. But there were trees to be cut 
down ; and there was underbrush to burn, a well to dig, 
a garden to get ready for the spring planting, and plans 
to make for the real log house that they would build as 
soon as winter was gone. When the weather kept them 
within the camp and close to the fireside, the father 
would frighten the boy and girl with his story of how 
the Indians had shot their grandfather, but he would 
keep up their courage by pretending that there were 
no Indians left in the Little Pigeon country ; and the 
children's mother would read to them out of her Bible 
the stories that the boy never forgot. So, because they 
had one another, they were happy and unafraid. 

" At this place," Lincoln wrote of himself years later, 
" Abraham took an early start as a hunter which was 
never much improved afterward. A few days before 
the completion of his eighth year, in the absence of his 
father, a flock of wild turkeys approached the new log 
cabin, and Abraham with a rifle gun, standing inside, 
shot through a crack and killed one of them. He has 
never since pulled a trigger on any larger game." 

There was no place where clothes could be bought 
for the children, nor was there any money to spend on 
them. Abe's cap was of coonskin, the tail hanging down 



12 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

behind for beauty. His shoes — when he wore any 
— were moccasins fashioned by his mother's delicate 
hands out of deerskin, and his trousers were of deer- 
skin, too. A shirt of home-made linsey-woolsey com- 
pleted his outfit. Stockings he never wore until he was 
a grown man. Lincoln has described the slipperiness 
of the deerskin moccasins and trousers when he got 
wet ; and how, with all their stretching, the deerskin 
trousers never quite covered his long brown legs. 

Food, except fish and game, was hard to find, and 
without flour or meal, and without a stove, it was hard 
to prepare. It is not strange that the hungry boy said 
in his quaint way, as his father asked a blessing on the 
dinner of baked potatoes, " Dad, I call these mighty 
poor blessings." 



CHAPTER III 

A BACKWOODS BOYHOOD 

The next year the Lincolns were able to put up a 
new log cabin. This was at least a safer place to live 
in than the half-faced camp. This cabin had neither 
window, nor door, nor floor. The children slept on a 
bed of leaves in the loft, which they reached by climb- 
ing a row of pegs driven into the wall. The bed down- 
stairs was built by driving a forked stake into the earth, 
near the corner of the room, and laying a pole from 
this stake across to each of two walls. On these cross- 
poles were laid rough boards, which were made soft 
and comfortable by covering them with leaves and 
clothing and the skins of wild animals. Such other 
furniture as they had, Tom Lincoln made out of the 
forest timber with his simple woodsman's tools. 

Here, for another year, the mother suffered from the 
exposure for which she was so little fitted and against 
which she was so ill-protected. Then came a dread dis- 
ease which struck down people and cattle alike. From 
this plague, there being no physician within thirty 
miles to care for her, Nancy Lincoln died. Father and 
son cut down a tree and out of the green timber built 
a rough box for her burial. In the woods near by they 
made her a grave and laid her to rest. 

Not long before this, cousins had come from Ken- 
tucky to live near them. Some of these cousins also 
died of the plague, and so there were other graves to 
dig, and strange boxes for the boy to help fashion. 
The children became familiar with the mystery of 



14 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

death. Nancy and Abe were now eleven and nine years 
old, too young to know how to make the home com- 
fortable, and too lonely to keep up the father's spirits. 
It seemed impossible for the disheartened man to give 
them proper clothing and food. The cabin continued 
doorless and windowless and forlorn. 

Abe was a most affectionate child, and the idea of 
leaving the dead mother alone in those dreadful woods, 
with no religious service, and no prayer except the 
unexpressed cry from his own heart, was more than 
he could bear. In some way he had learned to write a 
fair hand. He painfully wrote out a letter and gave it 
to a traveler into Kentucky to be delivered, whenever 
he coidd be found, to the missionary preacher, David 
Elkin, who had been their friend years before. Many 
months afterward the good preacher found his way to 
the settlement on Little Pigeon Creek and preached 
the funeral sermon by the grave of Nancy Hanks 
Lincoln, paying to her memory the tribute of praise 
that the little boy had hungered to hear. To this ser- 
vice came women, on horseback, from neighboring set- 
tlements, carrying their children on the saddle-bow, 
while the men ti*udged beside them through the woods. 
And from that day these neighbors kept in their 
friendly sympathy the serious, odd-looking boy, under- 
standing his sorrow and wondering what dreams there 
were in the depths of his mysterious eyes. 

Things went from bad to worse, until it began to 
look as if the family would be scattered, as Thomas 
Lincoln and his brothers and sisters had been thirty 
years before. Then there came a change. The father 
realized what the home needed most, and went back 
alone to Kentucky. There he found Sarah Johnston, 
a young widow, whom he had always known, and per- 



A BACKWOODS BOYHOOD 15 

suaded her to marry him. The coming of this new 
mother to Little Pigeon Creek was a fortunate thing 
for the Lincoln children, for she loved them and cared 
for them as tenderly as their own mother would have 
done. Her three children, too, brought into Abe's life 
the cheer of companionship that he had needed, and 
saved him from much of the melancholy toward which 
he was always strongly inclined. She was considered 
rich in the little Hoosier settlement. It took four 
horses to haul the real furniture that she brought. 
There were beds and chairs, and there was a fifty-dol- 
lar walnut bureau, the first the children had ever seen. 
This bureau was an object of such splendor that Tom 
Lincoln pronounced it " little less than sinful to own 
such a thing." 

Soon the cheerless cabin was made homelike. Into 
the open doorway Mrs. Lincoln had them fit a door of 
split timber. A window was cut through the logs and 
frames were set in. There was no glass in the frontier 
country, so they fastened sheets of greased paper 
across the window to let the light through. Boards 
were split with axe and wedge and laid on the earth 
for flooring. The open spaces between the logs in the 
walls were filled with clay. And so the cabin became 
a house. These were not the only changes. Between 
the boy and his new mother there sprang up an under- 
standing that soon ripened into love. She believed in 
him and encouraged him in a way that his father 
never did, and she saw to it that the ambitious boy 
had new and better opportunities to learn, and that 
his father and others did not disturb him when he 
wanted to read. Because she found him milike other 
children, she kept watch over him with special tender- 
ness. Fifty years later, when he had grown to man- 



16 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

hood and had given his life for his country, she re- 
called to a friend the boyhood that had been intrusted 
to her for guidance. " Abe was a poor boy," she said, 
" and I can say what scarcely one woman — a mother 
— can say in a thousand. Abe never gave me a cross 
word or look, and never refused to do anything I re- 
quested him. I never gave him a cross word in all my 
life. His mind and mine — what little I had — seemed 
to run together. He was here after he was elected 
President. He was the best boy I ever saw, or expect 
to see." And it was of her that he said in one of his 
rare bursts of confidence, " All that I am or hope to 
be I owe to my mother." 

Neighbors have left many accounts of Abraham's 
boyhood. These all testify that " he saw hardships, had 
meagre clothing, coarse food, and no advantage of 
securing an education. All who knew him agreed that 
his ways were not like those of other boys, and he was 
not fully understood." One thing is sure from his own 
accounts of his boyhood, that, with all its hardships 
and its days of sadness, it was a very happy one. 

It is hard to believe that, in the early days of the 
West, men and women had the same strange super- 
stitions that the Puritans had in New England two 
hundred years earlier. It is true, however, that in 
the country where Abraham Lincoln lived as a boy, 
people believed that their lives and fortunes were in- 
fluenced by visions, and ghosts, and witches. They be- 
lieved, for instance, that potatoes planted " in the dark 
of the moon " would suffer blight ; that fences built 
" in the light of the moon " were bound to fall ; that a 
bird at the window foretold death; that the breath of 
a horse in a child's face would give it the whooping- 
cough ; that work could not be commenced with safety 



A BACKWOODS BOYHOOD 17 

on Friday. Women supposed to be witches were driven 
from the neighborhood. The men told their dreams to 
one another and were guided by them, as men were 
in the days of Pharaoh of old. From the influence of 
these superstitions Abraham Lincoln never wholly 
escaped, and in the experiences of his after-life we 
find evidence of his belief in the supernatural. 

At Little Pigeon Creek the settlers had built a log 
church, much of the work on the windows, doors, and 
pulpit being the handiwork of Tom Lincoln and his 
boy, Abe. Here the younger Lincoln heard sermons 
from itinerant preachers, some of whom were ignorant 
and undignified, but all of whom were earnestly devoted 
to the welfare of their people. At this time a spirit of 
enmity toward slavery was beginning to be felt among 
the church folk in the Ohio valley. In many neighbor- 
hoods the people were helping negro slaves from over 
the river to escape to Canada and freedom, while the 
wandering preachers, who had seen some of the injus- 
tice of slavery farther south, denounced it from their 
pulpits and, in secret, helped to organize the anti- 
slavery movement in the border States. Mr. Lincoln 
and his wife were devout church members, and Abra- 
ham, although not yet interested in religious things, 
was regularly to be found at church, just as he was 
always to be found where men and women gathered, 
and where he could pick up something of value to add 
to his store of knowledge. 

For a time, while his sister was serving their neigh- 
bors, the Crawfords, as cook and housemaid, he was 
their farm-boy, clearing up stumps, plowing, harvesting, 
or splitting rails, for twenty-five cents a da} r , and by 
night tending the baby and helping about the house. 
He served Mrs. Crawford the more willingly because 



18 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

she was fond of him and had books to lend him. One 
of these books he took home to read in his bed in the 
loft in the early morning. He laid it between the logs 
in the wall, and a sudden rain in the night drenched 
it. Mr. Crawford refused to accept the book when he 
brought it back, and made the boy pull fodder for 
three days to pay for it. But at the end of three bitter 
days the boy owned his first book. In the weeks that 
followed, when he. could throw himself down by the 
fireplace and read at night, he made the book doubly 
his own by hard study. It was on his way to the inau- 
guration as President Lincoln that he recalled this 
experience in an address to the legislature of New 
Jersey : — 

" May I be pardoned," he said, " if, upon this occa- 
sion, I mention that away back in my childhood, the 
earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of 
a small book, . . . ' Weems's Life of Washington.' I 
remember all the accounts there given of the battle- 
fields and struggles for the liberties of the country, and 
none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply 
as the struggle here at Trenton. The crossing of the 
river — the contest with the Hessians — the great 
hardships endured at that time — all fixed themselves 
on my memory . . . ; and you all know, for you have 
all been boys, how those early impressions last longer 
than any others. I recollect thinking then, boy even 
though I was, that there must have been something 
more than common that those men struggled for." 



CHAPTER IV 

A STRANGE EDUCATION 

Neither the work in the woods nor that at the car- 
penter's bench attracted the growing boy. His interest 
in books made the lonely and exacting labor with axe 
and hammer harder for him to bear than it was for 
most boys. He became more and more absorbed in his 
day-dreams, until his hard-headed employers thought 
him lazy and tried to discourage his studies. But what 
he could not learn from his books he was willing to 
get from men. When a neighbor came down the road, 
or an emigrant from some far country drove his ox- 
team past the farm, the boy was found leaning against 
the fence asking questions, until discovered by his 
father and driven back to his work. 

In those days men were much given to talking poli- 
tics, growing excited over the respective merits of 
Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay. In their gather- 
ings, too, they discussed the debates between the Bap- 
tists and the Methodists, or the Campbellites and the 
Catholics, or they told strange tales about the life 
Robert Owen and his associates were leading in the 
New Harmony Community a few miles to the south- 
west, where all goods and lands were held in common, 
like those of a single family. It is no wonder that the 
boy had questions to ask, for the one thing that inter- 
ested him most was what men were doing in the great 
world that lay beyond his vision. 

The young farm-boy and carpenter came into con- 
tact with the world of men through two other employ- 



20 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

merits, — as clerk, one winter, in the general store at 
Gentryville, near by, and as ferryman, for almost a 
year, near where Anderson's Creek empties into the 
Ohio. At the village store, men gathered in the even- 
ings and on Saturday afternoons to read aloud from 
the weekly newspaper and to talk politics. Here they 
argued about slavery, and rejoiced that " Indiana had 
come in free," and that the Supreme Court had just 
decided that there could never be slaves in the new 
State. 

At Anderson's Creek, where Abraham plied his trade 
as ferryman, the Ohio was every day carrying past 
him cargoes from the East and South, far away. To 
his boat-landing came strange and interesting travel- 
ers, — men of the world, some of them, — from New 
Orleans and St. Louis, or from Pittsburg and New 
York. Again, on board the river craft, the youth saw 
companies of slaves, chained together like convicts, 
bound for the slave market farther south, and the sight 
was a " continued torment " to him. 

It was as ferryman that he earned his first dollar. 
He was eighteen years old. Two men asked him to row 
their trunks out to the passing steamer and each paid 
him half a dollar. He was bewildered by the sudden 
possession of so much money. " I could scarcely be- 
lieve my eyes," he said afterward. " You may think 
it was a very little thing, but it was a most important 
incident in my life. I could scarcely believe that I, a 
poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day. I was 
a more hopeful and confident boy from that time." 
These glimpses of the great world filled him with an 
eager desire to try his own fortune on the river, and 
the next year he and a companion took a natboat cargo 
for a Mr. Gentry to New Orleans. 



A STRANGE EDUCATION 21 

As schools were rare and the need to labor pressing, 
Abraham Lincoln's whole school life covered less than 
a single year. Many of his teachers knew little more 
than their pupils. But some of them, though possessed 
of scanty book-learning, had what was better, a know- 
ledge of the outside world and a public spirit that 
made them leaders of men. 

A mile and a half from Little Pigeon Creek a 
school was taught for a year or two by one of these 
men of affairs, Azel W. Dorsey. It must have been 
because in winter time even the busiest of men had 
leisure that Azel Dorsey was willing to teach, for he 
was one of the most active public men in the county. 
He had been coroner, and at this time was county 
treasurer. It was in his cabin that the people met to 
make Rockport the county seat, and in his cabin the 
first courts were held. He was one of the men who 
gave money to build the first bridges and to establish 
the first free library. Mr. Dorsey's little schoolhouse 
had window-panes of greased paper and a floor of split 
log puncheon. Here the Lincoln boy, now ten years 
old, attended for a few months. Here he learned bet- 
ter how to use the few books that came into his pos- 
session. Here he met all the other children for miles 
around and engaged with them in reading-matches and 
spelling-contests ; but, best of all, he learned from Azel 
Dorsey, the man of affairs, that no man has a right to 
be so busy with his own interests that he forgets his 
duty to his neighborhood and to the State. 

Four years passed before he went to school again. 
This time the course of study added manners to the 
three standard subjects, reading, writing, and arith- 
metic. The teacher, Andrew Crawford, who afterward 
rose to the dignity of a justice of the peace in Spencer 



22 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

County, stood at the door and sent the children out- 
side one at a time to come in and be presented to the 
others after the fashion of polite society. We can pic- 
ture to ourselves the awkward Lincoln boy, now six 
feet two inches in height, as he lifted his coonskin cap 
to pretty Kate Roby and tried to hide his blushes and 
his laughter in his effort to learn politeness. These 
lessons in manners, like all his other lessons, he re- 
membered, until, in the greater world of Spring-field 
and of Washington, people wondered how a man so un- 
gainly and so poorly dressed seemed never to forget to 
be a gentleman. 

To attend the next school, taught by a Mr. Swaney, 
Lincoln, now seventeen years old, walked back and 
forth nine miles each day. Because of the time it took 
to make the journey, he had to give it up after a few 
weeks and go to work. In these three schools he found 
a special interest in the reading-lessons, in the jjractice 
of declaiming " pieces " on Friday afternoons, and in 
writing compositions. Oue of his school-day writings was 
on " National Politics " and another was on " Cruelty 
to Animals." Thi-ough the interest of an admiring 
neighbor, a third essay, on " Temperance," was pub- 
lished in a newspaper. Reading intelligently, writing 
a clear hand, spelling fairly well, and making simple 
calculations with figures, — these, with a grotesque sort 
of training in etiquette, made up the boy's schooling. 
But it was not in the schools that he got his education. 
The fellowship of trees and streams and of the gentle 
wild things of the woods, the companionship of boys 
and men, the pages of the Bible and iEsop's Fables 
and the half-dozen other books that he devoured by 
the blaze of the fire, and the discipline of hard labor 
with axe and plow, — these were his teachers. 




THE BOY LINCOLN READING BY THE LIGHT OF THE FIRE 
(After a painting by Eastman Johnson made in 1868) 



A STRANGE EDUCATION 23 

In early days men traveled many miles to attend 
court, not because they had business there, but because 
the coming of the judge and lawyers from near and 
far brought into the life of the people something that 
was unusual and often dramatic. To the court house at 
Boonville, the nearest county seat, lawyers sometimes 
came from as far away as Louisville to try their cases, 
to settle for all time the questions of property rights, 
or to defend men charged with crime. Witnesses were 
examined, and speeches made. In spite of the prohibi- 
tion of slavery in the constitution of Indiana, appeals 
were made to these courts to permit the holding of 
negro slaves in the State. To these meetings of the court 
the young man Lincoln walked through the woods fif- 
teen miles, whenever he could manage to get away from 
his work. And here he fed his fancy and his ambition 
with thoughts of something greater in his own life 
than day labor. Here, too, he got a copy of the laws of 
Indiana from one of the lawyers, and found within its 
covers the Declaration of Independence, the Consti- 
tution of the United States, and the Constitution of 
Indiana. Here he read for the first time the protest of 
a free people against the wickedness of human slavery. 

As he listened to the lawyers, as in school and out 
he labored over his compositions, and as he read the 
few books that he could borrow, one great need im- 
pressed itself more and more upon him. He must learn 
how to make perfectly plain to others the thoughts 
that men and books suggested to him. Often he would 
hear words whose meaning he could not understand 
and about which his father would not let him ask 
questions, or he would find in his books things that 
nobody could explain to him, and as he struggled to 
make these things clear to his own mind, he saw how 



24 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

necessary it was to use the right words in order to 
make his thought plain to others. " I remember," he 
once said, " how, when a mere child, I used to get irri- 
tated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not 
understand. I do not think I ever got angry at any- 
thing else in my life ; but that always disturbed my 
temper, and has ever since. I can remember going to 
my little bedroom, after hearing the neighbors talk of 
an evening with my father, and spending no small part 
of the night walking up and down and trying to make 
out what was the exact meaning of some of their, to 
me, dark sayings. I could not sleep, although I tried 
to, when I got on such a hunt for an idea, until I had 
caught it ; and when I thought I had got it, I was not 
satisfied until I had repeated it over and over ; until 
I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, 
for any boy I knew to comprehend. This was a kind 
of passion with me, and it has stuck by me ; for I am 
never easy now, when I am handling a thought, till 
I have bounded it north, and bounded it south, and 
bounded it east, and bounded it west." 



CHAPTER V 

THE LAND OF FULL-GROWN MEN 

The time had come for restless Thomas Lincoln to 
undertake another migration. The earnings of the In- 
diana farm, added to what money father and son could 
save from their wages, had not been enough in four- 
teen years to enable them, with their ways of doing 
business, to pay the price of two dollars an acre for 
which the father had bought the place. Thomas Lin- 
coln had begun to hear stories of the richness of the 
Illinois prairie land. The tide of westward emigration 
was setting in once more, stronger than ever, and as 
usual Thomas Lincoln was drifting with the tide. 

The three families of Lincoln, Hanks, and John- 
ston, with Abraham Lincoln as chief teamster, got 
their worldly goods together in February, 1830, and 
started their ox-cart caravan on its westward journey. 
The State toward which they were bent bore the In- 
dian name, Illinois, which means " the land of full- 
grown men." Surely, here was a country in which the 
young Lincoln, now six feet and four inches tall, would 
find a place for himself. Abraham was twenty-one 
years old, and his own master. He laid in an outfit of 
notions, and as they traveled through the new country, 
sold them to the farmers and, by good bargaining, 
doubled his original capital of thirty dollars. 

The roads were heavy with frost and mud. At the 
fords — for there were no bridges — the ice had to be 
broken to let the wheels pass. The first of the com- 
pany to get into trouble was a small dog that at one 



26 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

of these crossings was left behind and ran up and down 
the farther bank protesting piteously. " I could not 
endure the idea of abandoning even a dog," Lincoln 
said, " so I took off my shoes, waded across the stream, 
and triumphantly returned with the shivering animal 
under my arm. His frantic leaps of joy and gratitude 
amply repaid me for all the exposure I had undergone." 
After helping the others establish themselves in their 
prairie home, Abraham Lincoln found his way to the 
village of New Salem, on the banks of the Sangamon. 
Here he entered the employ of Denton Off utt, by turns 
conducting his general store and flouring-niill, and 
finally undertaking for him a trading expedition to 
New Orleans. For this journey he built a flatboat and 
loaded it with bacon and farm produce, which he was 
to sell down the river. The venture was a financial 
success, and won for the young man Mr. Offutt's enthu- 
siastic good will. Three years before, he had made 
a similar journey for Mr. Gentry, so that the Missis- 
sippi was not strange to him. The woodsman's habit 
of close observation now led him, unconsciously, to 
note the physical features of the country through which 
the great river was carrying him, so that his retentive 
memory enabled him thirty years later to follow the 
movements of the vessels of Farragut and Porter and 
the armies of General Grant as they closed in ujion 
Vicksburg and permitted " the Father of Waters 
again to go unvexed to the sea." At New Orleans he 
attended the slave auction. Here he saw husbands and 
wives separated and children taken from their mothers 
and sold to strangers. The unspeakable cruelty of it 
all stirred the heart of the young man, who, as a boy, 
had been willing to fight his playmates to save a turtle 
from abuse, and who, as a man, had waded barefooted 



THE LAND OF FULL-GROWN MEN 27 

through the ice rather than abandon even a little dog. 
When he returned to Illinois, it was with a deepened 
sense of the injustice of human slavery. The sight 
of men and women in chains was still a "continued 
torment " to him. 

In his new home, as in Indiana, he was the strongest 
man in all the countryside. Wherever men gathered, 
his admiring employer, Mr. Offutt, was given to brag- 
ging of his clerk's strength, thus involving him in ath- 
letic contests. One of these rough-and-tumble affairs 
proved more important than Lincoln imagined. Jack 
Armstrong, the champion of the near-by settlement, 
Clary's Grove, had heard Mr. Offutt's boasts of young 
Lincoln's prowess until he could stand it no longer. 
He challenged Lincoln to a wrestling-match, which a 
touch of foul play converted into a fist-fight, and in 
which the champion of Clary's Grove bade fair to be 
defeated. Before he had finished, Lincoln had to whip 
the entire gang, one at a time, but he did it so thor- 
oughly and with such good humor that he won their 
hearty friendship and kept it ever afterward. 

In 1832, war with the Indians broke out in north- 
ern Illinois, and troops were called for to march against 
Black Hawk and his Indian braves. Lincoln, being 
out of a job, was among the first to enlist. Through the 
help of his new friends from Clary's Grove he was 
chosen captain. This was his first assurance that the 
thing he had always most desired, the good will of his 
fellow men, was his. The election to the captaincy 
was a success, as he declared long afterward, " which 
gave me more pleasure than any I have had since." 
By the time Captain Lincoln's company reached the 
front the war was over. The leisure time of this famous 
military campaign Lincoln spent in athletic sports, 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

running foot-races, and jumping and wrestling for the 
championship among the troops. The months out of 
doors, in daily touch with thousands of other soldiers, 
the close companionship, in camp and on the march, 
with so many young and active comrades in arms, 
strengthened in him the social spirit that was always a 
dominating characteristic, and encouraged him on his 
return to enter the campaign for the legislature. 

He was now twenty -three years old. and he had but 
ten days in which to get over the district and make 
the campaign. He introduced himself to the voters in 
a way that won their respect : " I was born ... in 
the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy or 
popular relatives or friends to recommend me. ... If 
the good people in their wisdom see fit to keep me in 
the background. I have been too familiar with disap- 
pointment to be very much chagrined."' His first cam- 
paign speech was made at an out-of-door meeting, 
where he had to restore order by getting down from 
the platform and thrashing a disturber. This won him 
the full sympathy of the crowd. The speech that fol- 
lowed is simple and boyish: "-Fellow citizens, I pre- 
sume you know who I am. I am humble Abraham 
Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to be- 
come a candidate for the legislature. My politics are 
short and sweet, like the old woman's dance. I am in 
favor of a national bank. I am in favor of the internal 
improvement system and a high protective tariff. These 
are my sentiments and political principles. If elected, 
I shall be thankful ; if not. it will be all the same." 

Lincoln lost the election, but in his own neighbor- 
hood of New Salem he received all but three votes out 
of over two hundred. The defeat, instead of discour- 
aging him, only aroused his ambition. He realized that 



THE LAND OF FULL-GROWN MEN 29 

he must keep on studying men, and that he must know- 
as much as the men knew with whom he had to deal. 
He made friends with Mentor Graham, the village 
school-teacher, and being determined to learn how to 
make what he had to say perfectly clear to the most 
ignorant of his hearers, he borrowed an English gram- 
mar of Mr. Graham and began to study the science of 
language. From others he secured the w T orks of Robert 
Burns and Shakespeare, which he read until he had 
many of the better passages by heart. His unlettered 
friends used to laugh at him as they w r atched him with 
one of these books in his hand, lying in the shade of 
a tree-trunk near the store where he worked, with his 
bare feet above his head, too absorbed to notice pass- 
ers-by or to think of possible customers. From the 
poet of the common people, from Shakespeare, and 
from the Bible, which he kept always near at hand 
and studied and memorized in his hours of leisure, he 
was getting the mastery of straightforward speech and 
becoming familiar with the simple, vigorous words that 
men have always understood. Thus was he fitting him- 
self to become one of the world's masters of English 
literary style. 

With the grammar to study and the masterpieces 
of English literature for daily companionship, he had 
something now to occupy all his thoughts and take his 
mind away from his day-dreams. But how was he to 
make a living in the meanwhile ? If he continued in the 
service of other men, his time would not be his own 
and his studies would suffer. When the opportunity 
came, not long afterward, to buy the New Salem store 
on credit, in partnership with a man named Berry, it 
offered him just what he most wished, — the possi- 
bility of making a living and pursuing his studies at 



30 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

the same time. But the fortunes of New Salem soon 
began to decline, his partner went to the bad, and the 
store of Berry and Lincoln " winked out," leaving 
unpaid a mass of notes whose magnitude led Lincoln 
to call them " the national debt," but all of which he 
finally paid in full. 

It was while he was trying to conduct this unfortu- 
nate business enterprise that a happy accident put into 
his hands his first law-book, and strengthened his deter- 
mination to become a lawyer. As he tells it : " A man 
who was migrating to the west drove up with a wagon 
which contained his household plunder. He asked if 
I would buy an old barrel for which he had no room, 
and which he said contained nothing of special value. 
I did not want it, but to oblige him, I paid a half-dol- 
lar for it, put it away, and forgot all about it. Some 
time after, I came upon the barrel, and emptying it 
upon the floor, I found at the bottom of the rubbish 
a complete edition of Blackstone's Commentaries. I 
began to read those famous works and I had plenty 
of time, for during the long summer days, when the 
farmers were busy with their crops, my customers 
were few and far between. The more I read, the more 
intensely interested I became. Never in my life was 
my mind so absorbed. I read until I devoured them." 

The failure of Berry and Lincoln brought the young 
student face to face once more with the problem of 
making a living without giving up his studies. Just at 
this crisis came an appointment as postmaster at the 
hands of President Jackson. For a few months he 
carried the mail in his high hat and read the news- 
papers that came into his keeping. Then came the first 
profitable employment he ever had. John Calhoun, 
the public surveyor, a Democratic official, needed an 



THE LAND OF FULL-GROWN MEN 31 

assistant on whose honesty and intelligence he could 
rely. Although Lincoln was a Whig, Mr. Calhoun 
persuaded him to study surveying and take the place, 
assuring him that he might retain his political inde- 
pendence. Following unconsciously in the footsteps of 
George Washington, he soon mastered the science of 
surveying, and found himself for the first time earning 
more money than the bare needs of life required. As 
postmaster and as surveyor he was enlarging his ac- 
quaintance and winning the regard of men. Already 
he had become known as " honest Abe Lincoln." 

During these years of struggle there came into his 
life a few months of great happiness. When he was 
twenty-three years of age, he met and loved Ann Rut- 
ledge, a fair-haired, delicate girl of nineteen, and in time 
he won her love. She had an air of gentleness and 
distinction and a mind of unusual clearness and power. 
As soon as he could become a lawyer and be able to 
provide a home, they were to marry. Suddenly a dread- 
ful illness came and she died. The shock that followed 
her death plunged Lincoln into such melancholy that 
his friends were afraid he would lose his mind. He 
went often to the spot where, he declared, his heart 
was buried. One stormy night he cried out in his 
sorrow : " I cannot forget. The thought of the snow 
and the rain on her grave fills me with indescribable 
grief." 



CHAPTER VI 

LAWYER AND LAWMAKER 

In 1834, the young man of twenty-five, who had been 
common laborer, farm-hand, carpenter, ferryman, flat- 
boatman, peddler, grocer's clerk, soldier, unsuccessful 
merchant, postmaster, and surveyor, and, all the way 
along, dreamer and thinker and student, became for a 
second time a candidate for the legislature, and was 
successful. 

His work as lawmaker satisfied the people, and he 
was elected again in 1836. The announcement of his 
candidacy for the legislature in 1836 contained one 
political principle which proved him a statesman rather 
than a politician. It was : " If elected, I shall consider 
the whole people of Sangamon my constituents, as 
well those that oppose as those that support me." 

In the legislative session of 1837, he brought about 
the enactment of a law which removed the State capi- 
tal from Vandalia to Springfield. This victory showed 
that, while other legislators were playing party politics, 
he had learned how to get things done. 

Far more significant than this venture in practical 
politics was his position on the question of slavery, which 
he caused to be recorded in the legislative journals, and 
to which he succeeded in getting one other representa- 
tive to sign his name. At this time the negro had few 
friends. Those who believed in ending human slavery 
at once and forever seemed not to understand that 
what they were proposing would not be possible in any 
lawful way, and their efforts at destroying that great 



LAWYER AND LAWMAKER 33 

evil not only made them feared and hated, but put off 
the longer the reform for which they were laboring so 
earnestly and so unwisely. Lincoln saw this, and yet 
both his conscience and his heart rebelled against 
slavery as an institution which, though lawful and 
therefore not to be overthrown by violence, was yet 
a great moral wrong. His feeling in the matter was 
expressed in a protest containing the following words: 
" Resolutions upon the subject of domestic slavery 
having passed both branches of the General Assembly 
at its present session, the undersigned hereby protest 
against the passage of the same. They believe that the 
institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and 
bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition doc- 
trines tends rather to increase than abate its evils." 
It required courage to make this protest at a time 
when those who expressed views on slavery even as 
moderate as Lincoln's were unpopular. 

Meanwhile, Lincoln had been diligently reading law, 
and in 1837 his great ambition was attained — he 
passed his examination for admission to the bar. 

The removal of the State capital that same year 
to Springfield, chiefly through his own efforts, as we 
have seen, led Lincoln to believe that in Springfield 
he would succeed best in the practice of his new pro- 
fession. Putting into his saddle-bags a little clothing 
and two or three law-books, he borrowed a horse and 
rode to the new capital. At the store of Joshua Speed, 
who was to become his intimate friend, he figured on 
the cost of furnishing a bedroom ; but the price, seven- 
teen dollars, was more than he had, so he asked for 
credit until Christmas, adding, " If my experiment here 
as a lawyer is a success, I will pay you then. If I fail 
in that, I will probably never pay you at all." He 



34 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

looked so utterly gloomy that Speed offered to share 
quarters with him. Lincoln took the saddle-bags up- 
stairs, laid them on the floor, and came down, this time 
beaming with smiles as he exclaimed, " Well, Speed, 
I 'm moved." 

At one end of Speed's store was a great fireplace 
about which the men of Springfield were wont to gather. 
Here the new lodger spent many spare hours arguing 
with the leaders of public opinion about the religious 
and political questions of the day. Here he met Ste- 
phen A. Douglas, then a rising young politician of 
opposite political faith, whose after-life, with its rival- 
ries, and its bitternesses, and its final loyal friendship, 
was to be so strangely interwoven with his own. Here 
a debating tournament was arranged, in which all the 
leading speakers were to take part. It was held in the 
Presbyterian church, where they could have a suitable 
audience, and it was at this gathering that Lincoln and 
Douglas had their first serious public debate. Some of 
the younger men in this group organized the literary 
society of Springfield in which Lincoln was to become 
a leading spirit. Here, also, he became famous as a 
teller of stories. 

The practice of law develops in the beginner an 
infinite patience. Its rewards come slowly. The young- 
lawyer had many friends, for he had a genius for win- 
ning the good will of men. From the first his success 
was assured, if only he could be patient long enough. 
Those were days when law-books were few. The attor- 
ney who won his cases needed a clear head and an 
understanding of a few principles of law, but, more 
than this, he must be able to win verdicts from jurors, 
who almost always were men of scanty education and 
many prejudices. Lincoln was not yet learned in the 



LAWYER AND LAWMAKER 35 

law, but lie understood human nature. In time it came 
to be known that no lawyer gained more readily the 
confidence of a jury and none won more verdicts than 
" honest Abe Lincoln." The experiment, as he called 
it, was a success, and his place at the bar was estab- 
lished. Yet while he was winning verdicts he contin- 
ued his studies. " The way to know the law," he said, 
"is very simple, though laborious and tedious. It is 
only to get books and read and study them carefully. 
Work, work, work, is the main thing." 

The best way to build up a practice and so make 
the problem of a livelihood less serious seemed to lie 
in the pursuit of politics, for in politics he could gain 
a larger acquaintance, do favors for others, and so find 
clients. The lawyers of that day were nearly all poli- 
ticians. Thus his interest in politics steadily increased, 
while his influence among his fellows was growing 
wider. In his campaigns he met all sorts and conditions 
of men, interested himself in their affairs, and discussed 
with them questions of government, — national and 
state, — displaying in his opinions much sound judg- 
ment. In the places of influence and power which he 
hoped some day to fill he expected opportunities for 
wider service to the community of which he was a 
part. 

In 1838 and in 1840, he was again elected to the 
legislature. In each of these sessions, the Whig party 
proposed him for presiding officer of the House of 
Representatives of which he was a member. In 1840, 
he was their candidate for presidential elector, to 
vote for William Henry Harrison for President. The 
men of Illinois had learned by this time to trust his 
rugged honesty, for in politics, as in the wrestling- 
matches of years ago, he " played fair." To the well- 



36 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

dressed and somewhat aristocratic society of Springfield 
Wo n stm presented the appearance of an oLgroT 
uncultivated, young countryman. He was young a^d 
poor, and he still realized how little he knew: But m n 
no longer despised him for his youth or his ignorance 
or dared mhcule his poverty. Through the" prac&e 
stump speeches and m ])iibl . c ^ = 

Ind in hi er r nCeS m th6 SprinSfel<1 debati »S «** 
and n his discussions m the tavern and at The coun 

try store, he had become a master of debate and was 
abundantly able to take care of himself T a' „ „nl " 
discussmn that called for a ready response to everl 
interruption, whether looked for or not * 

In Springfield a prominent citizen and legator 
named Former had built himself a new house Ipon 
in W ^ ft UP " % htai '^™>, the only Le 

er f r w°, he WOrM - This man M ««4 de- 
serted the Wing party and become a Democrat, and 
his disloyalty to his former principles had just been 
rewarded by appointment to an office that brought hTm 
a good meome, but cost him the respeet of many of 2 
^associates. Lincoln', frie , Kl> s , ^ 
after one of Lincoln's campaign speeches, Former 
asked leave to be heard. He commenced 'by saying 
hat the young man, Lincoln, would have to be "taken 
down and that he was soriy the task had fallen to 
him He wen on to answer Lincoln's speech in a way 
that showed how much older and wiser he thought 

Mb I*''., y0 ' mg UpStart Wh0se -"ition 

had become ks duty to rebuke. Lincoln waited until 

he fid " ' t 7 ' ed ' bUt WS """»« *» s, —l *hlt 
he did not intend to accept such treatment meekly. He 

closed h,s reply to Forquer by saying ,u The gentle. 



LAWYER AND LAWMAKER 37 

man has seen fit to allude to my being a young man ; 
but he forgets that I am older in years than I am in 
the tricks and trades of politicians. I desire to live, 
and I desire place and distinction ; but I would rather 
die now, than, like the gentleman, live to see the day 
that I would change my politics for an office worth three 
thousand dollars a year, and then feel compelled to 
erect a lightning-rod to protect a guilty conscience 
from an offended God." 

It was in one of these campaign speeches that Lin- 
coln was interrupted by some one in the audience who, 
thinking to humiliate him by reminding the people of 
his poverty, called out in the midst of his speech : " Mr. 
Lincoln, is it true that you entered this State bare- 
footed, driving a yoke of oxen ? " After a pause, the 
speaker replied that he thought he could prove the fact 
by at least a dozen men in the crowd, any one of whom 
was more respectable than his questioner. 

Hard as it was to be laughed at, it was not for 
Abraham Lincoln to become embittered by these un- 
kind attacks, for through years of exposure to the real 
hardships of life, he had learned patience. As he once 
said : " I have endured a great deal of ridicule without 
much malice ; and I have received a great deal of kind- 
ness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it." 
But ridicule was not all that he had had to bear. He 
had endured suffering and sorrow ; and he had walked 
through the valley of the shadow of death. Yet through 
it all he had kept his faith in a destiny which sorrow 
could not mar. 



CHAPTER VII 

MARRIAGE AND CONGRESS 



Springfield, in 1840, was an ambitious country 
town of about twenty-five hundred inhabitants. There 
was some wealth and some "flourishing around in 
carriages," as Lincoln put it. Among those who had 
money the young lawyer would have had little reason 
to expect to be treated especially well, for he was " poor, 
without the means of hiding his poverty." Fortunately 
he had no false pride ; he was not ashamed that he 
had nothing, nor did he boast of it in his speeches. The 
men of Springfield respected him for what he had 
accomplished. In society, although he was quiet and 
timid, he was a welcome guest, because he talked intel- 
ligently on the subjects that interested people, and his 
droll sayings were often repeated and laughed at. It 
seems odd that the rough flatboatman of ten years 
before should be put on the cotillion committee to 
manage the fashionable dances of the winter's season, 
but the fact was that he was liked by everybody, and 
m that society a man was not despised if he had 
real ability and was willing to help others and able to 
interest them. 

In the social life of the little town a young Demo- 
cratic politician, James Shields, afterward a United 
States Senator, and by President Lincoln's own ap- 
pointment a general in the Union Army, was making 
himself disliked by his airs of superiority. Lincoln" 
whose spirit of fun was apt to get him into trouble, 
wrote for the Whig paper a letter which he signed 



MARRIAGE AND CONGRESS 39 

"Aunt Rebecca," and in which he made sport of 
Shields. This letter Miss Mary Todd and another 
Springfield belle followed up with one or two more of 
the same sort. They made the people laugh at Shields, 
and they made Shields angry. To protect the young 
women, Lincoln let Shields believe that he was wholly 
to blame. Shields challenged Lincoln to fight a duel. 
Lincoln, being the challenged party, had the choice of 
weapons and chose broadswords. When we remember 
that Lincoln was a giant, six feet and four inches tall, 
and strong enough to lift a load of six hundred pounds, 
and that Shields was a little man with short arms and 
short legs, we can believe that in calling for broads words 
Lincoln was really preventing a fight, for he knew that 
Shields's sword could not touch him at any point, while 
he with his gigantic arms could disarm his opponent 
in a moment. It was his way of " laughing the case 
out of court." The duel never took place. Lincoln had 
made Shields look very foolish, but he had gone far 
enough in the affair to be heartily ashamed of himself. 
One lasting result of the Shields duel was that it 
brought Lincoln and Mary Todd together. Not long 
afterward they were married. Mrs. Lincoln was young 
and handsome and proud, and she was ambitious both 
for herself and for her husband. She had accepted 
attentions from Stephen A. Douglas, the most admired 
public man in Illinois, but she was saying already, 
what her friends thought very foolish, that she had pre- 
ferred Lincoln because he would live to become Presi- 
dent of the United States. They had four boys, only 
one of whom, Robert Todd Lincoln, lived to manhood. 
The boys were their father's comrades, and brought 
into his very serious and sometimes unhappy life much 
genuine fun. 



42 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

of Mason and Dixon's Line to permit slavery within 
their borders, but they believed that if they could get 
slavery introduced into the Territories, they would in 
time admit these Territories as slave States. As every 
State sent two Senators to Congress, the more Sena- 
tors there were who favored slavery, the longer would 
the slave States keep their control in national affairs. 
There had been more free States than slave States, but 
while practically everybody in the slave States favored 
slavery, the feeling in the free States was divided. 
In the free States, some men, known as abolitionists, 
wished to destroy slavery at once all over the land, 
while others were content if they could keep slavery 
from being introduced into the Territories. In the free 
States, too, there were large numbers of men who sym- 
pathized with the South. The aim of the slaveholders, 
then, was to push slavery into the Territories, and 
finally into all the States, while the aim of the men 
with whom Lincoln had allied himself was to keep 
slavery where it was, in the hope that with the admis- 
sion of the new Territories as free States the power of 
slavery in national politics would grow gradually but 
surely less. 

Many of the slaves in the South were well cared 
for; probably only a few masters were cruel to their 
negroes. But wherever there were slaves, whether 
treated kindly or harshly, under the law the negro had 
no rights which the white man was bound to respect. 
It was not because the masters were cruel, but because 
the law permitted them to do what they pleased with 
their slaves, treating them as property and not as hu- 
man beings, and because this view of the law seemed 
morally wrong, that the movement against slavery was 
becoming more powerful in the Northern States. It 



MARRIAGE AND CONGRESS 43 

was not because the slaveholders actually did wrong-, 
but because the law permitted them to do wrong, that 
men were beginning to protest against the extension of 
slavery. 

Henry Clay, the Whig candidate for the presidency, 
was defeated by James K. Polk of Tennessee, a friend 
of the slaveholders. The election of Polk encouraged 
the politicians in the Southern States to bring on a 
war with Mexico, in the expectation that the success 
of the war would add Texas to the Union as a slave 
State. It was a war for the extension of slavery which 
Lincoln and his friends believed was altogether wrong. 
Lincoln determined to go to Congress and fight the 
proposed wrong. He was elected in 1846, and was the 
only Whig Congressman from Illinois. His eight years 
in the State legislature, together with his close study 
of politics and the history of his country, helped make 
his influence felt at Washington. His old rival, Doug- 
las, was elected the same year from another district, 
but before his term commenced he was made Senator. 

When Lincoln got to Washington, he found the slave- 
holding interests protected by law on all sides. Although 
the Whigs were in the majority, there was nothing they 
could do to put an end to slavery. The city of Wash- 
ington was in a little District ten miles square, sur- 
rounded by the slave territory of Virginia and Mary- 
land. Just in sight of his boarding-place Lincoln saw 
what he described as " a sort of negro livery stable," 
where black men and women were bought and sold. 
This District was under the control of Congress. So 
Lincoln conceived the idea of persuading the people 
of the District to sell their slaves and of paying for 
them out of the United States Treasury, and forbidding 
slavery in the District of Columbia for all time to come. 



44 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

But Lincoln's plan failed. People did not yet fully 
realize the wickedness of slavery ; Lincoln saw that 
something more must be done to awaken men's con- 
sciences, or slavery would not only keep its hold on 
the South and in the new State of Texas, but would 
spread into the Territories and some day even into the 
free States. The Democratic party was in power and 
was controlled by the South, and the Whig party was 
unwilling to take sides on the great question. A few 
brave men were opposing slavery, but there was no 
political party organized to carry on the fight. The 
Republican party was not yet born. 



CHAPTER VIII 

RIDING THE CIRCUIT 

With Texas admitted into the Union as a slave 
State, the troubles between the South and the North 
seemed at an end. The South had gained what it 
wanted, while the North still had the assurance that 
the Missouri Compromise would save Kansas and Ne- 
braska and all the new Territories to freedom. Politics 
settled down to a struggle among the politicians for 
the offices. Lincoln went home to Springfield and took 
up again the practice of the law. 

For eight years he devoted his whole time to his 
profession. Innumerable stories are told of his law 
practice during these years. The judge, David Davis, 
afterward a justice of the Supreme Court of the 
United States, held court in fourteen different coun- 
ties in central Illinois. Every week he would move 
on to the next county seat, the leading members of 
the bar going with him. They rode horseback over the 
prairie, and filled in the spare hours as they rode, or 
consoled themselves for the poor fare at the country 
taverns, by telling stories or talking politics. The law- 
yers who rode the circuit with Lincoln and Judge 
Davis were men of ability, who had to try their cases 
and argue their points of law without the help of books. 
" Rough-and-ready " practitioners, they had learned to 
reason out their cases upon broad principles, and to 
take care of themselves and of their client's interests 
by thinking clearly and quickly upon their feet. Lin- 
coln seemed particularly well fitted to succeed under 



46 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

these conditions, and his reputation as a lawyer grew 
steadily. 

It is said of him that he could try a good case better 
than any of the others, but thatf, when convinced that 
his client was in the wrong, he would withdraw from 
the case rather than show the court, as he was sure 
to do, that he believed his client was wrong. Once a 
mean man came to engage him to sue a widow. After 
hearing his story Lincoln said : " Yes, there is a rea- 
sonable chance of gaining your case for you ! I can set 
a whole township at loggerheads. I can distress a poor 
widow and her six fatherless children, and so get for 
you six hundred dollars which rightfully belongs as 
much to her as to you. But you should remember that 
some things that are legally right are not morally 
right. I shall not take your case, but I '11 give you 
some advice for nothing. You seem to be an active, 
energetic man. I would advise you to try your hand at 
making six hundred dollars some other way." 

He was fair and even generous to the other side 
unless he believed there was fraud or meanness for 
him to punish. Then he was merciless. A paper of his 
has been preserved which gives the notes of a closing 
speech he made to a jury. It was a case in which he 
was attorney for the widow of a Revolutionary soldier 
who had been cheated out of her pension money by 
a dishonest agent. His notes for his argument read : 
" No contract. — Not professional services. — Unrea- 
sonable charge. — Money retained by defendant. — 
Not given by plaintiff. — Revolutionary War. — De- 
scribe Valley Forge, privations, ice, soldier's bleeding- 
feet. — Plaintiff's husband. — Soldier leaving home for 
army. — Skin Defendant. — Close." Lincoln was 
deeply stirred in delivering this speech, and the jury 



RIDING THE CIRCUIT 47 

were in tears, while the miserable pension agent whom 
Lincoln had " skinned " suffered tortures under the 
operation. 

Lincoln was often criticised by the other lawyers 
because he charged such small fees. They declared that 
it was no wonder he was poor. On one occasion Judge 
Davis put him through a mock trial for this offense, 
and, in fun, censured him at the bar of the court. On 
another occasion he embarrassed one of his law part- 
ners by making him pay back half of a fee that a 
client had willingly paid. " The money comes out of 
the pocket of a poor crazy girl," Lincoln said, "and I 
would rather starve than swindle her in this way." 

He was absolutely fair with the court. Once a part- 
ner prepared for filing in a case an answer which was 
not founded on facts, and Lincoln made him withdraw 
it. " You know it's a sham," he said, "and a sham is 
very often but another name for a lie. Don't let it go 
on record. The cursed thing may come staring us in 
the face long after this suit has been forgotten." 

He had heard the word " demonstrate " as one of the 
things that were done in geometry. He made up his 
mind, as he had in his boyhood, that he would learn 
how to demonstrate his points, that is, make them so 
clear that men could not help accepting them. He got 
himself a copy of Euclid's geometry and, as he rode 
the circuit, he committed to memory many of Euclid's 
demonstrations. He was still learning how to bound 
his thought on all sides. His speech became so crystal 
clear that men said, " If Lincoln is in the case, there 
will be no trouble in understanding what it is all 
about." He once said to his young partner, Mr. Hern- 
don, as he found fault with his high-flown, oratorical 
way of arguing his cases : " Billy, don't shoot too high 



48 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

— aim lower, and the common people will understand 
you. They are the ones you want to reach. The edu- 
cated and refined people will understand you anyway." 
His reading and observation had taught him that one 
of the best ways to make a point stick in memory is to 
illustrate it by a story, and he constantly told stories, 
both in his speeches and conversation. Court in the old 
eighth circuit, with Lincoln and his colleagues travel- 
ing about, eating and sleeping together, and trying 
their cases together, day after day, week in and week 
out, and telling stories wherever they met, was not a 
dignified, solemn place like the chamber of the Su- 
preme Court of the United States. Lincoln was irre- 
pressible. When he came on the scene he would intro- 
duce himself in this fashion, " Well, fellows, are n't 
you glad I 've come ? " and then, out of his unlimited 
store, he would bring forth a new story that would 
sometimes make the good-natured judge adjourn court 
to hear it. 

The clerk of the court tells how he was once fined 
for laughing out in the midst of a trial. " Lincoln had 
just come in," he tells us, " and leaning over my desk 
had told me a story so irresistibly funny that I broke 
into a loud laugh. Judge Davis called me to order in 
haste, as he said sternly, ' This must be stopped. Mr. 
Lincoln, you are constantly disturbing this court with 
your stories. Mr. Clerk, you may fine yourself five 
dollars for your disturbance.' I apologized, but told 
the judge the story was worth the money. A few min- 
utes later he called me to him. ' What was that story 
Lincoln told you ? ' he asked. I told him, and he 
laughed aloud in spite of himself. ' You need not pay 
that fine,' he said." 

In the earlier years of his practice, Lincoln used his 



RIDING THE CIRCUIT 49 

stories with great effect in his jury speeches. Once he 
was trying to make plain that his client, on trial for 
striking a man, had done the deed in an effort to defend 
himself, and illustrated his point by saying that his 
client was in the fix of the man who while carrying a 
pitchfork along a country road was suddenly attacked 
by a vicious dog. In the trouble that followed, the 
prongs of the pitchfork killed the dog. " What made 
you kill my dog?" the farmer angrily cried. " What 
made him try to bite me?" "But why didn't you go 
at him with the other end of the pitchfork ? " " Why 
didn't he come at me with the other end of the dog?" 
The jury saw what self-defense meant. 

In one of his cases he made fun of an opponent's 
long speeches. " My friend," he said, " is peculiarly 
constructed. When he begins to speak, his brain stops 
working. He makes me think of a little old steamboat 
we used to have on the Sangamon River in the early 
days. It had a five-foot boiler and a seven-foot whistle, 
and every time it whistled, it stopped." 

His practical sense and his understanding of human 
nature enabled him to save the life of the son of his 
old Clary's Grove friend, Jack Armstrong, who was on 
trial for murder. Lincoln, learning of it, went to the 
old mother who had been kind to him in the days of his 
boyhood poverty and promised her that he would get 
her boy free. The witnesses were sure that Armstrong 
was guilty, and one of them declared that he had seen 
the fatal blow struck. It was late at night, he said, and 
the light of the full moon had made it possible for him 
to see the crime committed. Lincoln, on ci-oss-exami- 
nation, asked him only questions enough to make the 
jury see that it was the full moon that made it possible 
for the witness to see what occurred, got him to say two 



50 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

or three times that he was sure of it, and seemed to give 
up any further effort to save the boy. But when the 
evidence was finished and Lincoln's time came to make 
his argument, he called for an almanac, which the clerk 
of the court had ready for him, and handed it to the 
jury. They saw at once that on the night of the mur- 
der there was no moon at all. They were satisfied that 
the witness had told what was not true. Lincoln's case 
was won. 

He argued his cases in a straightforward way, with- 
out oratorical effort, shunning long words and strange 
expressions, using the language of the Bible, or illus- 
trating what he had to say with an apt story, talking 
with the court and the jury as a man would talk famil- 
iarly with a group of old friends and neighbors, and 
" demonstrating " his points as Euclid had taught him. 

Mr. Herndon, who continued as Lincoln's law part- 
ner during the later years of his life, has told of his 
way of keeping a crowd amused: "I have seen him 
surrounded by as many as two or three hundred per- 
sons, all deeply interested in the outcome of a story. 
His power of mimicry and his manner of recital were 
remarkable. All his features seemed to take part in 
the performance. As he neared the point of the joke, 
or story, every vestige of seriousness disappeared from 
his face. His little gray eyes sparkled ; a smile seemed 
to gather up, curtain-like, the corners of his mouth ; his 
frame quivered with suppressed excitement ; and when 
the point or ' nub ' of the story, as he called it, came, 
no one's laugh was heartier than his." 

In those days he seemed not to know, or care, how 
he looked. He was poor, and he had a growing family. 
His very poverty made friends for him. His dress was 
simple. His hat was rusty and faded with age. He 



RIDING THE CIRCUIT 51 

wore a gray shawl. PI is coat hung loosely on his gaunt 
frame, and his trousers were always too short. He 
carried a faded green umbrella, with the letters " A. 
Lincoln," sewed on in white muslin. Its handle was 
gone, and it was usually held together with a bit of 
string. 

With all his traveling about over the circuit, there 
were still four or five months in every year when court 
was not in session. This gave the lawyers time for 
other things. Lincoln's spare days were spent "mous- 
ing about the libraries in the State House." He was 
studying the Constitution of the United States, mak- 
ing himself familiar with his country's history, and, in 
season and out of season, studying the slavery question. 
It was not in his years of successful law practice, when 
he was one of the leaders of the bar in Illinois, that 
he proved his greatness as a lawyer, so much as it was 
in his complete mastery of the Constitution in its rela- 
tion to the slavery question, as he afterward revealed 
it in his debates with Douglas. In the prairies of Illi- 
nois, sometimes dreaming, sometimes thinking deeply, 
this country attorney became one of the learned con- 
stitutional lawvers of his time. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS BORN 

Busy as he was in the practice of law, Lincoln 
kept on studying the signs of the times. The speeches 
of abolitionist leaders came into his hands and he read 
regularly two Southern newspapers. He wrote an 
occasional political editorial for a Springfield paper 
and he made a few campaign speeches, but his real 
interest was in the practice of his profession. 

While Lincoln was a- looker-on at the great drama 
of national politics, his old-time rival, Stephen A. 
Douglas, Senator from Illinois, was becoming one of 
the chief actors, restraining, as well as he could, the 
growing feeling of discontent that the anti-slavery 
spirit in the North had bred, and casting about for 
some safe way in which the slave States might be held 
loyal to the Union. Already the politicians in the 
South were threatening to carry their States out of 
the Union unless the demands of slavery were granted. 
Already Douglas was dreaming that he himself might 
be the means of holding South and North together, 
and become the choice of both sections for President. 

The admission of Texas as a slave State had strength- 
ened the slave power, but it had not satisfied it. The 
threats of secession continued. Clay and Webster and 
Douglas, as well as others who dreaded war and were 
willing to yield almost anything to preserve the Union, 
devised a new measure called the Compromise of 1850, 
the effect of which was to increase the feeling between 
the North and the South. One of its features was the 



THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS BORN 53 

passing of a new Fugitive Slave Law, which compelled 
citizens in the free States to help the officers of the 
United States capture runaway slaves and send them 
back to their masters. Men of the North had not seen 
human beings bought and sold, and, because they knew 
little about slavery, many thought little about it. Some 
who would not have been willing to own slaves believed 
that perhaps the negroes were better off as slaves than 
as free men. But when they saw a runaway black man 
flying through the streets, and learned that they were 
bound by law to help catch him and send him back to 
life-long bondage, they began to awaken to the serious- 
ness of slavery as a moral question. Wherever this 
law was enforced, the anti-slavery feeling became more 
bitter. 

But the passing of a new Fugitive Slave Law did 
not satisfy the South. If slavery was right, as many 
Southerners believed, it seemed hard that a slaveholder 
should lose his slaves when he took them into free ter- 
ritory. So the Southern leaders in Congress, believing 
that the anti-slaveiy spirit was unjust, sought every 
opportunity to strengthen the political power of the 
South, and compelled the passage of a law repealing the 
Missouri Compromise and clearing the way, as they 
hoped, for introducing slaveiy into the vast territories 
west and northwest of Missouri. Nebraska, as that 
country was called, was unsettled except by Indians. 
It was not to be opened for settlement until Congress 
could decide whether it was to continue free or become 
slave territory like Missouri. In 1854, Senator Douglas 
secured the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, open- 
ing Nebraska to settlement and leaving to the new set- 
tlers the decision of the question whether there should 
be slaves in the Territory or not. This plan of having 



54 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

the people of the Territory settle the slavery ques- 
tion for themselves was ealled " popular sovereignty." 
Douglas believed that to leave to the people most con- 
cerned — not counting the slaves as people, of course, 
— the decision of this troublesome question was fair 
to everybody, and he hoped that the North as well as 
the South would be satisfied with it. But the South 
protested at once that slavery could gain nothing, for 
most of the voters in the Territories would favor free- 
dom. And in the North the enemies of slavery believed 
that they saw in Douglas's " popular sovereignty " one 
more surrender of principle to the slave power. If slav- 
ery was wrong, they argued, why should the people of 
the Territories be allowed to make it lawful? This was 
the question that Douglas had to answer when he came 
back to Illinois on the adjournment of Congress in 
1854. A crisis had come. The enemies of slavery were 
at last ready to say to the slave power in Congress, 
'* Thus far shalt thou go and no farther ! " 

Lincoln saw the danger and threw himself into poli- 
tics again, heart and soul. The " irrepressible conflict" 
between slavery and freedom had begun in earnest. It 
was not long after this that he wrote a letter to his 
friend Joshua Speed, who had gone back to Kentucky 
to live. In this letter he showed how the Fugitive Slave 
Law and the other laws in favor of slavery had stirred 
his feelings. He wrote : " I confess I hate to see the 
poor creatures hunted down and caught and carried 
back to their stripes and unrequited toil ; but I bite 
my lips and keep quiet. ... It is not fair for you to 
assume that 1 have no interest in a thing which has, 
and continually exercises, the power of making me 
miserable. You ought rather to appreciate how much 
the great body of the Northern people do crucify their 



• THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS BORN 55 

feelings in order to maintain their loyalty to the Con- 
stitution and the Union." 

He was fair enough to see, at the same time, that 
there was a sincere difference of opinion between the 
men of the South and the men of the North. He at- 
tacked slavery as an institution, and tried to persuade 
men to join him in his effort to keep slavery from grow- 
ing. But he had no unkind words for those who did 
not agree with him. One of his addresses delivered at 
Peoria, in 1854, makes this clear : " Let me say that I 
think I have no prejudice against the Southern people. 
They are just what we would be in their situation. If 
slavery did not now exist among them, they would not 
introduce it. If it did now exist among us, we should 
not instantly give it up." 

The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and the 
repeal of the Missouri Compromise, largely through 
Douglas's efforts, created instant alarm in Illinois. 
Party feeling had not run high for many years. Doug- 
las, who was believed at heart to be opposed to the 
extension of slavery, had enjoyed the confidence of the 
State in a remarkable way. Suddenly the entire situa- 
tion changed. Thousands of Illinois Democrats who 
were opposed to slavery began to doubt Douglas and 
to be dissatisfied with his leadership. 

The senatorial term of James Shields, Lincoln's an- 
cient adversary and Douglas's friend, came to an end, 
and Lincoln was the choice of the Whigs to succeed 
him. When the legislature met to elect a Senator, 
Lincoln needed five more votes to secure an election. 
There were five anti-slavery Democrats in the legisla- 
ture, but they were unwilling to vote for Lincoln and 
held out for Lyman Trumbull. Trumbull's five votes 
and Lincoln's forty-four were enough to control the 



56 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

election. So Lincoln, fearful lest a Douglas Democrat 
might be elected, made haste to withdraw from the 
race and to persuade his friends to vote for Trumbull. 
In this way Lincoln suffered one more disappointment, 
but, by securing Trumbull's election, gained for free- 
dom one more vote in the United States Seriate. 

Up to this time in the Northern States, party lines 
had not been drawn on the slavery question. There 
were Slavery Democrats and Free Soil Democrats, 
and there were Slavery Whigs and Free Soil Whigs. 
But by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the 
adoption of measures which made slavery possible in 
Kansas and Nebraska, the voters of Illinois were so 
aroused that they refused to interest themselves in any 
other political question. The Whig party began to go 
to pieces, and many Democrats questioned Douglas's 
leadership for the first time. Anti-slavery men broke 
away from both Whigs and Democrats and organized 
the Republican party, whose one aim was to keep slav- 
ery out of the Territories. The friends of slavery within 
the Whig party in Illinois became Douglas Democrats, 
while the Republicans chose Lincoln for their leader. 

From this time until Lincoln defeated Douglas for 
the presidency in 1860, there was only one great na- 
tional issue — the slavery question ; and the two men, 
Lincoln and Douglas, by virtue of their leadership, 
were constantly pitted against each other, the one de- 
claring that slavery was a moral wrong and demanding 
that it be kept out of the Territories, the other saying 
nothing about the right or wrong of slavery, but insist- 
ing that the people of the Territories be allowed to 
decide for or against it as they saw fit, and adding 
that he " did not care whether slavery was voted up 
or voted down." 



THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS BORN 57 

The first national convention of the new Republican 
party was held, in 1856, at Philadelphia. It named 
John C. Fremont for President and William L. Day- 
ton for Vice-President. In this convention Lincoln 
received 110 votes for Vice-President. He was evi- 
dently not disappointed with the result, for he wrote 
to one of the delegates afterward : " When you meet 
Judge Dayton, present him my respects, and tell him 
I think him a far better man than I for the position 
he is in." 

The presidential campaign of 1856 was, from the 
first, a straight-out fight between the friends and the 
enemies of slavery. James Buchanan led the slavery 
forces and John C. Fremont commanded the hearty 
support of nearly all the anti-slavery people. A small 
number of Whigs, still unwilling to take sides, either 
against slavery or in favor of it, nominated Millard Fill- 
more for President, and adopted a platform, charging 
the other parties with trying to destroy the Union. 
The plan of the Democrats to give over to slavery the 
new States of Kansas and Nebraska, if the people liv- 
ing there should vote that way, and the declaration of 
Senator Douglas that he did not care which way the 
people of Kansas and Nebraska voted, filled Lincoln 
with indignation. He went into the political struggle 
with a grim determination to " demonstrate " to the 
people of his State that slavery was wrong. 

The idea of celebrating the Fourth of July by read- 
ing the Declaration of Independence to the people and 
proclaiming that " all men are created free and equal," 
in a land where slavery was permitted and where new 
territory was being turned over forever to the control 
of the slave power, seemed horrible to him. In bit- 
terness he exclaimed : " The Fourth of July has not 



58 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

quite dwindled away; it is still a great day — for 
burning firecrackers ! ! ! " 

The time was at hand when men could no longer 
refuse to take sides. Buchanan was elected, but the 
Republicans had cast nearly a million and a half votes. 
Lincoln and the other enemies of slavery felt that their 
fight for freedom had not been in vain. In his next 
great public address in the summer of 1858, Lincoln 
spoke these words of cheer to his followers : " Two 
years ago the Republicans of the nation mustered over 
thirteen hundred thousand strong. We did this under 
the single impulse of resistance to a common danger, 
with every external circumstance against us. Of strange, 
discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from 
the four winds, and formed and fought the battle 
through, under the constant hot fire of a disciplined, 
proud, and pampered enemy. Did we brave all then to 
falter now, — now, when that same enemy is wavering, 
dissevered, and belligerent ? The result is not doubtful. 
We shall not fail — if we stand firm, we shall not fail. 
Wise counsels may accelerate, or mistakes delay it, but, 
sooner or later, the victory is sure to come." 



CHAPTER X 

THE DEBATES WITH DOUGLAS 

The term of Stephen A. Douglas, as United States 
Senator, was about to expire in 1858. He returned 
to Illinois in the summer of that year to find the 
people aroused over the slavery question as they never 
had been before, and the new Republican party under 
Lincoln's leadership eager to do battle. 

The two men had been rivals for twenty years. It 
was while Lincoln was serving his first term in the 
legislature that Douglas, a young- man of twenty-one, 
had come from Vermont to Illinois. He was as poor as 
Lincoln had been four years before, when at the same 
age he drove his father's ox-team across the prairie. 
But Lincoln remained poor and obscure, while Douglas 
rose at once to prominence. At twenty-two Douglas 
was State's attorney, and in six years more he had 
been legislator, register of the land-office, secretary of 
state, and judge of the supreme court. At thirty-three 
he had served two terms in Congress and was made 
United States Senator. He was reelected Senator in 
1852, and now, in 1858, he was asking the .people of 
Illinois to elect him again. He had been twice a promi- 
nent candidate for President, and he was now the most 
conspicuous man in public life in the United States. 
In the legislature of the State and in Congress, in court 
and on the stump, he and Lincoln had been constantly 
in each other's way. Even in the social life of Spring- 
field and in seeking the good graces of Mary Todd, he 
had been Lincoln's rival. 



60 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

The two men were most unlike, in looks, in manner 
of speech, in social condition, and in temperament. It 
was a strange rivalry. Lincoln was a physical giant, 
lank and bony in figure, yellow in face, with high cheek- 
bones, a long neck, a heavy jaw, and a large mouth 
with deep lines drawn about it. With his hollow cheeks 
and his look of hopeless melancholy, when his face was 
in repose, his gray eyes deep set beneath bushy eye- 
brows and giving out no expression, except when he 
was aroused from his habit of absent-minded contem- 
plation, he was at all times a figure at once fascinating 
and unapproachable. When he was awakened from 
his far-away mood, his eyes flashed and his face lighted 
up with a smile whose sweetness and charm were irre- 
sistible. 

His voice was a high, clear tenor which, in his occa- 
sional moments of passionate excitement, became thin 
and shrill. He wore shabby clothes, probably because 
he could not afford anything better, but he cared little 
for appearances. His mind was absorbed with serious 
things. 

Douglas was a little over five feet in height, and 
thickset, with a lion-like head crowned with a luxuri- 
ance of soft brown hair. His voice has been compared 
with the rich bass tones of a cathedral organ, thrilling 
men's bodies as well as their souls. He dressed with 
scrupulous neatness, and carried himself with the grace 
and some of the imperious air of a prince of the blood 
royal. His life had been one continuous series of suc- 
cesses. Everything he wanted had come to him, as if 
by right, until he considered himself a child of fortune, 
while Lincoln had learned by bitter experience all the 
lessons that disappointment and sorrow have to teach. 
In this struggle for the senatorship, Douglas was to 



THE DEBATES WITH DOUGLAS 61 

have one more victory and Lincoln another disap- 
pointment. 

In one of his speeches, Lincoln paid this tribute to his 
adversary : " Twenty-two years ago," he said, " Judge 
Douglas and I became acquainted. We were both 
young then, he a trifle younger than I (four years). 
Even then we were both ambitious — I perhaps quite 
as much as he. With me the race of ambition has been 
a failure — a flat failure. With him it has been one of 
splendid success. His name fills the nation and is not 
unknown in foreign lands. I affect no contempt for the 
high eminence he has reached. I would rather stand 
upon that eminence than wear the richest crown that 
ever decked a monarch's brow. The judge means to 
keep me down — not put me down, for I have never 
been up." In this tribute Lincoln showed in his own 
nature a modesty for which the world has always loved 
him. 

Having made up his mind that the slavery question 
must be brought home to every voter, and that Doug- 
las's position, of not caring whether slavery was ex- 
tended into the Territories or not, was wrong, Lincoln 
challenged Douglas to a public discussion of the ques- 
tion. He believed that a series of debates in which he 
and Douglas should speak from the same platform to 
the same people would give him an opportunity to reach 
many of the Democrats who would not come to Repub- 
lican meetings, and would keep the people alive to the 
seriousness of the situation. Douglas accepted the chal- 
lenge. The debates were arranged so that one should 
occur at each of seven different places. Each debate 
was to last for three hours, the time being divided 
equally between the two speakers. The places chosen 
were Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charleston, Gales- 



62 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

burg, Quincy, and Alton. These were small country 
towns widely scattered over the State. 

Hither flocked the friends of each speaker, each 
crowd wild with enthusiasm for its own candidate. 
Men came from other States, and reporters from Chi- 
cago, New York, and other cities, traveled with the 
speakers, the Chicago reporters sending to their papers 
every word that was spoken, so that straightway the 
world was reading the speeches and discussing every- 
where the right and wrong of slavery and the argu- 
ments for and against popular sovereignty which 
Douglas and Lincoln were making. 

The two men were equally matched. Each had had 
a lifelong training in public speaking and each was 
perfectly at home on the platform, quick to take ad- 
vantage in the discussion, and ready to meet any at- 
tack, however savage. It was a battle of the giants. 
Each was admired and loved by his own supporters 
and admired and feared by the supporters of the other. 
And each, firmly convinced that he was right, had the 
confidence in his own cause which a conviction of the 
right always gives. Both were terribly in earnest. 

Lincoln commenced his speech accepting the nomi- 
nation to the senatorship with a prophecy about slav- 
ery which he believed might not come true for " a 
hundred years at least," but which was actually ful- 
filled seven years later, when, as a result of the Civil 
War, the slaves were set free throughout the United 
States. He said : " ' A house divided against itself 
cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure 
permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect 
the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house 
to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. 
It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either 



THE DEBATES WITH DOUGLAS 63 

the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread 
of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in 
the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinc- 
tion ; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall 
become alike lawful in all 4 the States, old as well as 
new, North as well as South." 

This was a statement of what he believed to be true, 
but Douglas insisted that it expressed Lincoln's wish 
rather than his belief. In Douglas's mind it meant 
that Lincoln would destroy the Union unless he could 
drive slavery out of all the States. " Mr. Lincoln goes 
for a war of the sections," Douglas argued, " until one 
or the other shall be subdued. I go for the great 
principle of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the right of 
the people to decide for themselves." But Lincoln re- 
sponded that when Douglas denied the truth that " a 
house divided against itself cannot stand," he was dis- 
puting a much higher authority than Abraham Lincoln. 

It was during the debate at Charleston that Lincoln 
found an opportunity to make use of the knowledge of 
geometry which he had picked up as he rode the cir- 
cuit not many years before. Judge Douglas had an- 
swered some direct charges relating to his public acts 
that had been made by Senator Trumbull by calling 
Senator Trumbull a liar. Douglas was greatly excited 
throughout this particular debate, and Lincoln's attacks 
had not been soothing. " If you have ever studied 
geometry," Lincoln argued, " you remember that by a 
course of reasoning Euclid proves that all the angles 
in a triangle are equal to two right angles. Euclid has 
shown you how to work it out. Now, if you undertake 
to disprove that proposition, and to show that it is 
erroneous, would you prove it to be false by calling 
Fnclid a liar?" 



64 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

As the debates proceeded, the public interest grew 
to a feverish state of excitement. The audience in 
some places numbered twenty thousand, the men and 
women and children coming into the town on horse- 
back, in wagons, and on foot, with brass bands and 
with fife and drum, and crowding the dusty highways 
for fifteen or twenty miles in every direction. As they 
neared the town, processions were formed with ban- 
ners and transparencies on which some political senti- 
ment was printed, such as, " The government was made 
for white men — Douglas for life"; or " Old Abe 
the Giant-Killer and Rail-Splitter." A common feature 
of the parade was a group of pretty girls in white on 
horseback representing the States of the Union, while 
a sad-looking girl in black rode alone bearing a banner 
that proclaimed her to the world, " Kansas — I will 
be free." The Democratic procession had to follow a 
different road from that taken by the Republicans to 
avoid the danger of a riot. 

When the speaking began, the shouting and the 
tumult ceased and men listened breathless to the man 
they loved or feared, feeling that on the words they 
heard the fate of the nation rested. Sometimes one or 
the other debater caught the infection of the popular 
excitement and sprang to his feet to deny his oppo- 
nent's statements, but was pulled back into his seat 
with the reminder that silence would be wise. 

When Lincoln arose to speak, he showed at first 
some timidity as he stood at f idl height towering above 
his rival, so that as he began to answer the elegant 
Douglas, even his friends, for the moment, felt sorry 
for him. He planted himself squarely on his feet, with 
his hands clasped behind him, and stood almost motion- 
less, talking in an awkward, friendly fashion to men 



THE DEBATES WITH DOUGLAS i>5 

whom he treated like old acquaintances. As he warmed 
to his subject, he would soon forget himself. He had a 
fashion of standing still, while he spoke in his deliber- 
ate, familiar way, until he came to some climax where 
he thought he had made a point on Senator Douglas, 
when he would swing his long right arm with his long 
bony forefinger in an abrupt circle as if drawing a line 
in the air about the point he had just made, and there 
would come over his face a smile of assured good will, 
as if to say in confidence to an audience of old friends, 
"Did n't I get the Little Giant that time?" This char- 
acteristic trick of speech and the warmth of the smile 
that went with it seldom failed to win the sympathy 
of any wavering voter into whose eager face he looked. 

A boy who heard the debates recalls that "while I 
had thought Lincoln the homeliest man I ever saw, he 
was the handsomest man I ever listened to in a speech. 
Lincoln, in action, no one has ever been able to de- 
scribe. He was simply grandeur itself." 

One of the reporters who later became a journalist 
of note has described his unique way of speaking : 
"The impression made upon me by the orator was 
quite overpowering. I have never heard anything since 
that I would put on a higher plane of oratory. All the 
strings that play upon the human heart and under- 
standing were touched with masterly skill and force, 
while beyond and above all skill was the overwhelming 
conviction pressed upon the audience that the speaker 
was charged with an irresistible and inspiring duty to 
his fellow men. Although I heard him many times 
afterward, I shall longest remember him as I then saw 
the tall, angular form with the long, angular arms, at 
times bent nearly double with excitement, like a large 
flail animating two smaller ones, the mobile face wet 



66 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

with perspiration which he discharged in drops as he 
threw his head this way and that like a projectile — 
not a graceful figure, yet not an ungraceful one. After 
listening to him a few minutes, nobody woidd mind 
whether he was graceful or not. All thought of grace 
or form would be lost in the exceeding attractiveness 
of what he was saying." 

The debates started all America to thinking. The 
slavery question was uo longer only a question of poli- 
tics ; it had come to be a question of good and evil. 
And the man who had presented unanswerably the 
cause of liberty had become a national figure, to whom 
all who would restrain the slave power were beginning 
to turn for leadership. 

Lincoln summed up the whole controversy in these 
words, which left nothing more to be said : " That is 
the real issue. That is the issue that will continue 
in this country when these poor tongues of Judge 
Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal 
struggle between these two principles, right and wrong, 
throughout the world." 

Douglas won the senatorship, but his advocacy of 
popular sovereignty had driven President Buchanan 
and the Southern leaders into active hostility to him 
and to all that he had argued for, and split the Demo- 
cratic party in two, the Northern Democrats being for 
him and the Southern Democrats bitterly opposed to 
him. Lincoln lost the senatorship, but he had gained 
the whole North for an audience, and had given the 
Republican party courage for the national struggle 
that was soon to come. He himself was no longer an 
obscure country lawyer. The world was beginning to 
listen to him and to watch with eagerness for what- 
ever he might have to say. 



THE DEBATES WITH DOUGLAS 67 

He was disappointed at his defeat, but he felt that 
the light had not been in. vain, for it had awakened 
the enemies of slavery to the real danger that confronted 
them. He wrote to a friend : " I am glad I made the 
late race. It gave me a hearing on the great and durable 
question of the age, which I could have had in no other 
way ; and though I now sink out of view, and shall be 
forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which 
will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am 
gone." 



CHAPTER XI 

THE NOMINATION 

The campaign for the senatorship had left Lincoln 
poorer than ever ; it had kept him from earning any- 
thing at the law, and it had burdened him with heavy- 
expense. Douglas had gone about in private cars and 
special trains, while Lincoln had only such accommoda- 
tion as he had the money to pay for, sometimes a horse, 
sometimes a crowded railway coach, sometimes the 
caboose of a leisurely freight train. When he made his 
contribution to the campaign fund, it was with the con- 
fession that he was " absolutely without money now, 
even for household purposes." He went back reluc- 
tantly to the law, for he felt that his country needed 
his services now more than ever before. To a friend 
he wrote, " The fight must go on. The cause of civil 
liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one, 
or even one hundred defeats." He earned a little by 
delivering a few lectures, and he got back for a few 
months into a fairly active law practice. But it was 
only for a few months. To him came appeals from all 
parts of the country to help in the fight against slavery. 
He declined an invitation to speak in Boston in April, 
1859, because he could not leave his work; but in the 
fall, he spoke in Kansas and Wisconsin, and followed 
Douglas into Ohio, speaking in the same places and 
answering the Little Giant's arguments much as he 
had done in Illinois the year before. 

Lincoln's speeches had been printed and read all over 
the country. Republicans here and there were begin- 



THE NOMINATION 69 

ning to say to one another, " If Douglas is to be the 
Democratic candidate for the presidency, what better 
choice could there be for his antagonist than Abra- 
ham Lincoln ? " When an occasional suggestion of this 
sort reached him, Lincoln was entirely sincere in his 
answer, " I must say I do not think myself fit for the 
presidency " ; or, as he wrote to a Western judge, " It 
seems as if they ought to find somebody who knows 
more than I do." 

Early in 1860, he was invited to New York to lec- 
ture at Cooper Institute. The audience which was to 
hear him was made up of some of the most cultivated 
people in the United States. David Dudley Field and 
Horace Greeley were on the committee. William Cullen 
Bryant was to preside. The idea that he, the self-taught, 
modest country lawyer could possibly bring anything 
to this educated company of Eastern people that they 
would care to hear, seemed strange to him, and he hesi- 
tated to accept the invitation. 

It is interesting to know how the orator from the 
prairies impressed one of that audience who has given 
us his recollections of the speech. ;t It is now forty 
years," said Mr. Joseph H. Choate, "since I first saw 
and heard Abraham Lincoln, but the impression which 
he left on my mind is ineffaceable. . . . He appeared 
in every sense of the word like one of the plain people 
among whom he loved to be counted. At first sight 
there was nothing impressive or imposing about him — 
except that his great stature singled him out from the 
crowd ; his clothes hung awkwardly on his giant frame, 
his face was of a dark pallor without the slightest tinge 
of color ; his seamed and rugged features bore the fur- 
rows of hardship and struggle ; his deepset eyes looked 
sad and anxious ; his countenance in repose gave little 



70 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

evidence of that brain-power which had raised him from 
the lowest to the highest station among his countrymen ; 
as he talked to me before the meeting, he seemed ill at 
ease, with that sort of apprehension which a young man 
might feel before presenting himself to a new and 
strange audience, whose critical disposition he dreaded. 
. . . When he spoke he was transformed ; his eye kin- 
dled, his voice rang, his face shone and seemed to light 
up the whole assembly. For an hour and a half he held 
his audience in the hollow of his hand." 

Lincoln chose for a text Senator Douglas's proposition 
that the men who had created the nation and framed 
its Constitution " had understood the slavery question 
just as well and even better than we do now," and 
proceeded to show that they had seen the evils of slavery, 
and planned the government so as to keep slavery out 
of the Territories and put it in the way of ultimate 
extinction. He went on : " As those fathers marked it, 
so let it be again marked, as an evil not to be extended, 
but to be tolerated and protected only because of and 
so far as its actual presence among us makes that tol- 
eration and protection a necessity." This was as far 
as Lincoln's party had yet gone in its opposition to 
slavery, — that it was "an evil not to be extended." 
The difference between South and North, as he explained 
it, was a difference as to whether slavery was right, as 
the South believed, or wrong, as the North believed. 

" Wrong as we think slavery is," Lincoln said in 
the conclusion of his speech, "we can yet afford to let 
it alone where it is, because that much is due to the 
necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation ; 
but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to 
spread into the national Territories, and to overrun us 
here in these free States ? If our sense of duty forbids 



THE NOMINATION 71 

this, then let us stand by our duty fearlessly and 
effectively. . . . Neither let us be slandered from our 
duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened 
from it by menaces of destruction to the government, 
nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that 
right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end 
dare to do our duty as we understand it." 

From New York he went into New England, where 
he followed the same line of argument, insisting that 
under the Declaration of Independence the negro was 
entitled to an equal right with the white man in the 
enjoyment of life, liberty, and happiness. " One of the 
reasons why I am opposed to slavery is just here," he 
argued. " When one starts poor, as most do in the race 
of life, free society is such that he knows he can bet- 
ter his condition ; he knows that there is no fixed con- 
dition of labor for his whole life. I am not ashamed 
to confess that twenty-five years ago I was a hired 
laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flatboat — just what 
might happen to any poor man's son. I want every 
man to have a chance — and I believe a black man is 
entitled to it — in which he can better his condition 
— when he may look forward and hope to be a hired 
laborer this year and the next, work for himself after- 
ward, and finally to hire men to work for him. That is 
the true system." 

At New Haven he made his heai-ers think of slavery 
as a serpent. He said : " If I saw a venomous snake 
crawling in the road, any man would say I might seize 
the nearest stick and kill it ; but if I found that snake 
in bed with my children, that would be another ques- 
tion. I might hurt the children more than the snake, 
and it might bite them. Much more, if I found it in 
\ed with my neighbor's children, and I had bound 



74 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Democratic National Convention met in April at 
Charleston, South Carolina. Over half the delegates 
were for Douglas, but it required a two-thirds vote to 
make a nomination. They adopted a platform in favor 
of popular sovereignty over the protest of the South- 
ern delegates, who wanted the party to declare for 
universal slavery. " We want nothing more," the 
slavery delegates said, " than a simple declaration that 
negro slaves are property, and we want the recogni- 
tion of the obligation of the federal government to 
protect that property like all other." To this the Doug- 
las delegates refused to agree. Delegates from twelve 
of the slave States left the convention and later nomi- 
nated John C. Breckenridge for President. What was 
left of the convention adjourned until June, and then 
nominated Stephen A. Douglas. From this time until 
the election, the Democratic party remained divided, 
the Southern Democrats supporting Breckenridge and 
most of the Northern Democrats remaining loyal to 
Douglas. 

The week before the Republican National Conven- 
tion at Chicago, the Illinois Republicans held their State 
convention at Decatur. Lincoln was sitting on the 
platform when a delegate announced that an old De- 
mocrat of Macon County wanted to make a contribu- 
tion. Just at this moment John Hanks came into the 
hall bearing two old-time fence-rails decorated with 
flags and a streamer, on which was printed : — 

"ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

The Rail Candidate for 

President in 1860. 

Two rails from a lot of three thousand made in 1830 by 
John Hanks and Abe Lincoln." 




(From an original negative taken at Lincoln's home in Springfield, soon after his nomi: 
tion. When he saw the proof Lincoln remarked. " Well, that expresses me better than 
any I have seen " ) 



THE NOMINATION 75 

It was an exciting- moment. To the convention the 
rails meant that, under Abraham Lincoln's leadership, 
the struggle they were just entering would be between 
the plain people of the Lincoln type and a powerful 
slave aristocracy who had no sympathy for labor. The 
convention went wild. Lincoln stood awkwardly, almost 
bashfully, smiling at the enthusiasm of his friends 
while he waited for quiet to say : " Gentlemen, I sup- 
pose you want to know something about those things," 
pointing to the rails. " I don't know whether we made 
those rails or not; the fact is, I don't think they are 
a credit to the maker's" (laughing as he spoke). "But 
I do know this. I made rails then, and I think I could 
make better ones than those now." 

The Chicago Convention met on May 16. Among 
its delegates were the greatest orators and statesmen 
of the day. They were seeking a candidate whom men 
of all shades of opinion could support, from the aboli- 
tionists demanding Seward's nomination, to the men 
of the border States, who, although favoring slavery, 
were loyal to the Union. The candidate of whose 
nomination the Eastern delegates were confident was 
William H. Seward of New York, who had been the 
governor of New York and the Eepublican leader in 
the United States Senate. But Seward's hatred of 
slavery had led him to go much farther than Lincoln 
had ever gone and to speak of a law that was higher 
than the Constitution and the Supreme Court. Besides 
this it was feared that his extreme opinions on other 
political questions might make it harder to elect him 
than it would be to elect a more moderate man. People 
who admired Seward as a brilliant leader still feared 
that he could not carry the Northern vote as against 
Douglas. So it came about that Lincoln was chosen. 



76 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

While the balloting was going on, Lincoln was wait- 
ing for the news at Springfield, tossing ball and try- 
ing hard to restrain his excitement. When at last the 
message came that he was nominated, he was sitting in 
a newspaper office. He looked long at the message, 
folded it and put it into his vest-pocket as he remarked 
quietly, " There 's a little short woman down at our 
house who would like to hear this. I '11 go down and 
tell her." 



CHAPTER XII 

THE ELECTION 



1860, Lincoln stayed at home in Springfield. In a room 
at the State House he made welcome the multitude of 
visitors who came to see him, meeting in the same easy, 
friendly fashion, the dignified statesman from far away 
and the old lady from New Salem who had brought a 
pair of woolen socks of her own knitting for " Old Abe " 
to wear when he became President of the United States. 
It took no card of admission to get into Lincoln's pre- 
sence. Daily, men crowded into the room to learn the 
news of the campaign and to laugh with Lincoln at his 
own inimitable stories. 

The fact that men spoke familiarly of him as " Old 
Abe the Rail-Splitter " made many Eastern Republicans 
uneasy lest he prove unfit for the fearful responsibility 
that would come to the new President. But when they 
had talked with him at Springfield, their eyes were 
opened and they knew him. They found him wise and 
strong and calm ; and as the months passed, something 
in his spirit took hold upon them as it has upon the 
world in these later years, and awoke in them a ten- 
derness of affection for this man who had made his 
way through poverty and sorrow to the leadership of 
a great people. 

There were three other candidates for the presi- 
dency, each supported by a strong political party and 
each advocating different principles of government. 
The Northern Democrats, believers in popular sover- 



78 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

eignty, and caring little about slavery, were for Ste- 
phen A. Douglas. The Southern Democrats, believing 
firmly in the righteousness of slavery and demanding 
that Congress protect slave property in the Territories, 
supported Breckenridge of Kentucky. The men who 
were afraid lest the agitation of the slavery question by 
either its friends or its enemies would bring ruin to the 
country organized the Constitutional Union party and 
nominated John Bell of Tennessee, on a campaign 
platform which "recognized no political principle 
other than the Constitution of the country, the Union 
of the States, and the enforcement of the laws." 

Those who opposed slavery in the Territories were 
all within the Republican party, and, as the cam- 
paign went on and they came to know Lincoln better, 
worked tirelessly and almost passionately for his elec- 
tion. Those who either favored slavery or did not care 
whether it won or lost made up more than half of all 
the voters in the United States, but their votes were 
divided among Douglas and Breckenridge and Bell. 
Before November came, it was plain that the Republi- 
cans would profit by the divisions among the other 
three parties and would elect Abraham Lincoln to the 
presidency. 

The feeling oE unrest in the South was growing. 
Threats of secession continued, and became so frequent 
that Lincoln began to wonder if the South really meant 
it. Every effort was made to get him to say something 
that would satisfy the South of his kindly feeling, or 
something that would persuade his equally violent anti- 
slavery friends in the North that he meant to do no- 
thing to strengthen the cause of slavery. To those who 
tried to get him to say what he intended to do he 
answered : " The time comes upon every man when it 



THE ELECTION 79 

is best for him to keep his lips closed. That time has 
come upon me." And when they insisted on his assur- 
ing the South that he would not interfere with slavery, 
he only answered by reminding them of what he had 
said in his many speeches in the past : " Those who 
will not read or heed what I have already publicly said 
would not read or heed a repetition of it. ' If they hear 
not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be per- 
suaded, though one rose from the dead.' " So he wrote 
no letters, and made no speeches, but waited patiently 
and in silence for the people to make their choice. 

The men who had been candidates for the Repub- 
lican nomination for the presidency, and particularly 
William H. Seward of New York and Salmon P. Chase 
of Ohio, wrote and spoke and worked day and night in 
aid of his election. Seward gave to his home newspaper 
on the night of his own defeat an editorial article in 
which he said : " No truer or firmer defender of the 
Republican faith could have been found than the dis- 
tinguished citizen on whom the honors of the nomi- 
nation have fallen." The men of letters, Holmes, 
Whittier, Bryant, Lowell, and George William Curtis, 
came at once to his support. But the entire North was 
not friendly. There were the abolitionists, many of 
whom fought him bitterly and applied to him that 
scornful name, " the Slave Hound of Illinois." Al- 
though their only hope of ever getting rid of slavery 
lay in his election, they refused to trust him. More 
disappointing to him than the unreasoning enmity of 
the abolitionists was the unfriendly feeling of many of 
the preachers in his own town of Springfield. He could 
not understand it. Nor could they understand, in after 
years, how it was that they had so misjudged him. 

'"These men," he said, " well know that I am for 



80 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

freedom in the Territories, freedom everywhere as far 
as law will permit, and that my opponents are for slav- 
ery. They know this, and yet with this book" (draw- 
ing the New Testament from his pocket) " in their 
hands, in the light of which human bondage cannot 
live a moment, they are going to vote against me. I 
do not understand it at all. I know there is a God, 
and that He hates injustice and slavery. I see the 
storm coming, and I know that His hand is in it. If He 
has a place and work for me, and I think He has, I 
believe I am ready. I am nothing, but truth is every- 
thing ; I know I am right because I know that liberty 
is right. . . . Douglas does n't care whether slavery 
is voted up or down, but God cares, and humanity 
cares, and I care, and with God's help I shall not fail. 
I may not see the end ; but it will come, . . . and 
these men will find they have not read their Bible 
right." 

The future as he saw it was in God's hands. As he 
heard from the South the mutterings of rebellion, the 
threats of the ruin that would come upon the country 
if he should be chosen its President, a sense of his own 
helplessness and of his need of divine strength came 
to him. He grew more religious as this sense of need 
became greater. " If any church will make as its only 
requirement obedience to the command, ' Thou shalt 
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and 
strength, and thy neighbor as thyself,' " he declared, 
" I will join it." 

As the months passed the excitement grew. Lincoln 
kept silence at home while Douglas traveled over the 
country, in the South as well as in the North, address- 
ing the people in his passionate, inrperious way and 
seeking to arouse them to a sense of the dangers they 



THE ELECTION 81 

were facing. He boldly attacked the Southern politi- 
cians for their threats of breaking up the Union, and 
appealed to the loyalty of the masses who had always 
listened to him before, only to find they had lost faith 
in him and were bent on his defeat. 

The telegrams on election night soon told of Lin- 
coln's success. Before morning he fell into one of 
his melancholy moods, weighed down with the vision of 
a divided country to govern and a bitter war to fight, 
and wanting to be left alone with his anxious thoughts. 
In the strain of the excitement which he was going 
through, there came to him a vision that seemed to fore- 
tell disaster. From his boyhood he had believed that 
through men's dreams come promises and warnings for 
their guidance, from on high. He had thrown himself 
upon a couch to rest and, as he lay there, he saw his 
giant figure reflected in a mirror. But there were two 
images of himself, the face of one bearing the flush of 
health, while the other was gray, with something of the 
pallor of death upon it. It made him uneasy, and he got 
up and walked about to get rid of the horror it gave 
him ; yet when he came back a second and a third time, 
the double image was still there. He spoke of it to 
Mrs. Lincoln, and they made up their minds that this 
was a prophecy that he was to be President twice, but 
that he would not live through his second term. 

In one of his dreams he saw himself passing through 
a great throng of people. Men made way for him, but 
as they did so, one said with scorn, " He 's a common- 
looking fellow." " Friend," he said in his dream, " the 
Lord prefers common-looking people ; that is why He 
made so many of them." 

During the next four months the excitement contin- 
ued at fever-heat. The Southern leaders began to carry 



82 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

out the threats they had made during the campaign. 
The conspiracy to break up the Union became a reality 
four days after the election, when the Senators from 
South Carolina resigned. The Southern States held 
conventions, voted to withdraw from the Union, and 
provided millions of dollars for war. The South was 
confident that secession would come about without shed- 
ding a drop of blood, while the North was panic-stricken, 
ready to give up almost anything that the South might 
ask. Until he should become President in March, 
Lincoln was helpless. He kept his temper sweet, as he 
had learned to do in his long struggle with adversity. 
At the mass meeting held in celebration of his elec- 
tion he was able to say : " In all our rejoicings let us 
neither express nor cherish any hard feelings toward 
any citizen who has differed with us. Let us at all times 
remember that all American citizens are brothers of a 
common country." 

To those who were urging the North to give up all 
that it had won by the election, he privately counseled 
patience and firmness. " There is no possible compro- 
mise upon the extension of slavery," he wrote. "On 
that point hold firm, as with a chain of steel." 

As the time drew near when he must go East to take 
up his duties as President, he went from Springfield for 
a little visit to his stepmother at her farm near Charles- 
ton, Illinois. He visited his father's grave and left direc- 
tions for a monument to his father's memory. Here he 
met the survivors of the Johnston and Hanks families 
with whom he had come to Illinois, a barefooted immi- 
grant, thirty-one years before. The mother, whose love 
had followed him through all the years, gave him her 
blessing, and as in tears she said good-by, told him of 
her fear that wicked men would kill him. To this same 



THE ELECTION 83 

melancholy prophecy which another old-time friend 
gave him he answered gayly, " Well, Hannah, if they 
do kill me, I shall never die again." 

On the morning of February 11, 1861, it rained 
heavily. A special train had been provided to take the 
new President and his party to Washington. Two or 
three hundred people had gathered at the little Spring- 
field station. Just as the train was starting, Mr. Lin- 
coln asked the conductor to wait a moment. He turned 
toward the people, removed his tall hat, paused for 
several seconds until he could control his emotions, 
and then slowly and with deep feeling gave them this 
simple farewell : — 

" No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feel- 
ing of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the 
kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have 
lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from 
a young to an old man. Here my children have been 
born, and one is buried. All the strange checkered 
past seems to crowd upon my mind. I now leave, not 
knowing when or whether ever I may return, with a 
task before me greater than that which rested upon 
Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine 
Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With 
that assistance, 1 cannot fail. Trusting in Him, who 
can go with me, and remain with you, and be every- 
where for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet 
be well. To His care commending you, as I hope your 
prayers will commend me, I bid you an affectionate 
farewell." 

An old friend, who stood with bared head in the 
pouring rain while these words were spoken, has de- 
scribed the scene for us : " We have heard Mr. Lincoln 
speak upon a hundred different occasions, but we never 



84 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

saw him so profoundly affected, nor did he ever utter 
an address which seemed to us as full of simple and 
touching eloquence. . . . Although it was raining fast 
when he began to speak, every hat was lifted, and 
every head bent forward to catch the last words of the 
departing chief." 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE PRESIDENCY 

The new President had decided to make a round- 
about journey to Washington, stopping on the way at 
the chief cities of the North and East. He had a special 
purpose in doing this. Though he had faith in the peo- 
ple, he was not sure that they were yet fully aroused 
to their responsibility ; and he realized that they were 
not at all sure of him. He must lead them to see that 
the preservation of the Union depended on them. 

At Indianapolis, his appeal to the citizens was meant 
for the loyal people of all the States. He said : " I ap- 
peal to you again to constantly bear in mind that not 
with politicians, not with Presidents, not with office- 
seekers, but with you, is the question : Shall the Union 
and shall the liberties of this country be preserved to 
the latest generations ? " 

War was at hand. South Carolina, Mississippi, 
Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, one 
at a time, had declared themselves to be independent 
States, and by resolution proclaimed the Union at 
an end between themselves and the United States of 
America. Only two days before Lincoln started from 
Springfield, Jefferson Davis was elected President of 
the Confederate States of America. While Lincoln 
was greeting hundreds of thousands of loyal citizens 
of the North on his journey to Washington, Davis was 
on his journey to his inauguration at Montgomery, Ala- 
bama, making speeches in all the cities and promising 
his Southern audiences that those who should interfere 



8G ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

with the new nation would " smell Southern pc ler 
and feel Southern steel." 

On his journey Lincoln came face to face wi 
uncounted multitude of loyal men, and left thei in- 
spired with a stronger faith in the cause and a gi 
loyalty to the Union. For nearly a year he had ept 
silence, and now, as his time of power and res 
bility at last approached, he spoke cautiously, aro 
no passions, making neither promises nor threats but 
trying - , in his own gentle way, to learn for himself iow 
strong was the people's love of country and ho\ far 
they would go with him in his task of saving the U on. 

His was a strange nature. He felt the sorro' of 
men as few have ever done, for he had soundec the 
depths of human suffering. He sympathized an he 
understood. At the same time he did not alk^ the 
seriousness of life to break him down or make his eet 
and gentle nature bitter. Men did not understam 
he could have the heart to laugh while all the > rid 
was in tears; but somehow, in his laughter as w as 
in his tears, he found a way into men's hearts, ai he 
held his place there as much by the cheer he br( ght 
as by the sorrow that he shared. 

The events which were happening in the South ur- 
ing this momentous journey had aroused the an ety 
of the whole country. The new President's spe lies 
showed how fully he realized the seriousness of tli sit- 
uation ; and yet he was able, at times, to play wit his 
audience as he had done in his happiest moods at 1 no. 
At Lebanon, Indiana, when the car on which he >od 
jerked about and almost threw him from the plat 
he laughingly called the attention of the crowd t< 
well he was learning the poetry of motion ; ai at 
Thorntown, he had his fun with the anxious com my 



THE PRESIDENCY 87 

tht had gathered to see him, excusing himself from 
a peech because there was uo time to make one, but 

iring to tell them a story if every person there 
wuld promise solemnly never to repeat it. As soon 
a the promise was secured, the train pulled out, as 
Licoln doubtless knew it would, leaving the crowd 
whout its story, but shouting after the departing 

1 'sident, " We won't ever tell." 

\t the little town of Westfield, New York, he said, 
" have a correspondent in this place, a little girl 
nmed Grace Bedell, and I would like to see her." 
C ice was there, eleven years old, and Lincoln stepped 
fim the train to greet her. The year before she had 
w.tten to him to suggest that he would look better 
w h a beard, and he had answered her letter. And now, 
wh all the cares of state and the thoughts of war 
ciwding his mind, he was able to remember the little 
g and where she lived ; and he was simple-minded 
e. ugh to say to her as he greeted her, "You see I 
hi r e let these whiskers grow for you, Grace." 

le continued to remember that there was no per- 
se al tribute to himself in the outpouring of the people 
a hey greeted him on his journey. It merely showed 
tl ir loyalty to the country he had been called to serve. 
" is true," he said at Albany, " that, while I hold 
imelf, without mock modesty, the humblest of all 
ihividuals that have ever been elevated to the presi- 
d cy, I have a more difficult task to perform than 
ar one of them." 

n the same humility of spirit he said to another 
gdiering of Union men : " I cannot but know what 
yo all know, that without a name, perhaps without a 
re son why I should have a name, there has fallen upon 
m a task such as did not rest even upon the Father 



88 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

of his Country ; and so feeling, I can turn and look 
for that support without which it will be impossible 
for me to perform that great task. I turn, then, and 
look to the American people, and to that God who has 
never forsaken them." 

At Philadelphia, on Washington's birthday, he was 
asked to speak at Independence Hall. Here he gave 
new expression to the spirit which had given the De- 
claration of Independence to the world, and here there 
seemed to come to him again the thought that in time 
death by violence might be his lot. To a friend he 
once told of the many times he had been warned that 
he would be killed. " Soon after I was nominated at 
Chicago," he said, " I began to receive letters threat- 
ening my life. The first one or two made me a little 
uncomfortable, but I came at length to look for a regu- 
lar installment of this kind of correspondence in every 
week's mail, and up to inauguration day I was in con- 
stant receipt of such letters, but they have ceased to 
give me any apprehension." The friend expressed sur- 
prise at this, but Lincoln replied in his peculiar way, 
" There is nothing like getting used to things." 

The morning of March 4 found the new President 
still in doubt as to who were to be in his cabinet, for 
Seward, whom he had depended upon from the first, 
had taken offense because Chase was to be Secretary 
of the Treasury, and he was now declining to serve 
as Secretary of State. At the last moment, and after 
the ceremony of the inauguration was over, Lincoln 
persuaded Seward to change his mind, and the cabi 
net list was complete. William H. Seward of New 
York was to be Secretary of State ; Salmon P. Chase 
of Ohio, Secretary of the Treasury ; Simon Cameron 
of Pennsylvania, Secretary of War; Edward Bates of 



THE PRESIDENCY 80 

Missouri, Attorney-General ; Gideon Welles of Con- 
necticut, Secretary of the Navy ; Caleb B. Smith of 
Indiana, Secretary of the Interior ; Montgomery Blair 
of Maryland, Postmaster-General. Of these seven 
men, upon whose loyal support and wise advice the 
success of his administration as President was so 
largely to depend, he had no real knowledge. The first 
four were chosen because in the nominating convention 
at Chicago they had been his prominent rivals for the 
presidency. Bates of Missouri, and Blair of Maryland, 
he had chosen because they were from slave States 
and so could help him in the effort that he knew must 
be made to keep the slave States that bordered upon 
Mason and Dixon's Line loyal to the Union. Among 
them all, not one was his personal friend ; and yet it 
was to them he must look for guidance in the struggle 
he was now entering. 

At noon, James Buchanan, the retiring President, 
worn and broken with the cares of state, and glad to 
escape the responsibilities of war, called at Lincoln's 
hotel and the two drove together to the Capitol. The 
day was clear and beautiful, and the streets and public 
places were thronged. A peaceful revolution was tak- 
ing place. James Buchanan, the friend of the slave 
power, who without protest had allowed the South to 
take possession of the nation's forts and arsenals, was 
courteously escorting to the inauguration Abraham 
Lincoln, the champion of the Union, who on his part 
was pledged to reclaim from the seceding States the 
property which Buchanan had permitted them to take. 
Close beside their carriage rode a guard of mounted 
soldiery. At every corner, on the housetops, and even 
underneath the platform on which the two Presidents 
were to stand, there were armed men. On a hilltop 



90 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

near by a company of artillery commanded the scene. 
It was a peaceful revolution, but the spirit of war was 
in the air. " All thoughts were anxiously directed to 
an impending civil war. All dreaded it ; all sought to 
avert it. While the inaugural address was being de- 
livered, devoted altogether to saving the Union without 
war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to de- 
stroy it without war. . . . Both parties deprecated war ; 
but one of them would make war rather than let the 
nation survive ; and the other would accept war rather 
than let it perish. And the war came." Thus Lincoln 
described the situation four 3'ears later. Many of the 
troops that guarded the presidential party wore citi- 
zens' clothes, and the day, to all outward seeming, 
gave no signs of the feeling that stirred every man's 
heart. The excitement was intense. As far as the eye 
could see, southward into Virginia and northward into 
Maryland, there was slave territory, and on every side 
there was hostility toward all that the new President 
represented. 

As Lincoln rose to deliver his inaugural address 
there was a moment of embarrassment. He held a 
gold-headed cane in one hand and his printed speech 
in the other. When he took off his new high hat, he 
did not know what to do with it. He is said to have 
remarked in his droll way, as he looked up at the mar- 
ble columns of the Capitol, " I don't see any nail on 
those columns to hang this on." Just then Stephen A. 
Douglas, for so many years his rival, stepped forward 
and took the hat, as he remarked with a smile, " If I 
can't be President, at least I can hold his hat." 

Lincoln's old-time friend, Edward D. Baker, who 
with Lincoln and Douglas had practiced law on the 
Illinois circuit twenty years before, and was now a 



THE PRESIDENCY 91 

Senator from Oregon, introduced him to the audience 
of over a hundred thousand people that had gathered 
by the east portico of the Capitol. The speech, read 
in a clear tenor voice, was heard throughout the vast 
throng, and the next morning was discussed in every 
household in the land. The South as well as the North 
had been waiting to learn what the President would do. 
Would he let the " wayward States depart in peace," 
as one of his advisers had urged ? Would he carry war 
into the South, and compel the seceding States to yield 
to the federal power? Or would he wait until the South 
should strike the first blow? The world listened eagerly 
to this first expression of his purposes toward the South. 
The speech left no one in doubt either as to the Presi- 
dent's intention to maintain the authority of the gov- 
ernment and defend it against all assaults, or as to his 
firm determination that if war was to come, the South 
must strike the first blow. To the South he said : "In 
your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not 
in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The gov- 
ernment will not assail you. You can have no conflict, 
without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no 
oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, 
while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, 
protect, and defend it.' " Nor was there any doubt of 
his kindly feeling toward his " dissatisfied fellow coun- 
trymen," for in the face of threats and violence, he was 
still able to reason with them and beg them to wait 
patiently a little longer in the assurance that their 
rights under the Constitution and the laws would be as 
secure now as ever they had been. 

The closing words of the address, written by Presi- 
dent Lincoln upon the suggestion of Secretary Seward, 
have become almost as familiar to the American people 



92 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

as the Gettysburg oration : " I am loath to close. We 
are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. 
Though passion may have strained, it must not break 
our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, 
stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to 
every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad 
land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again 
touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of 
our nature." 

He turned to the venerable Chief Justice of the 
United States, Roger B. Taney, and with his hand upon 
the Bible slowly repeated the oath : " I, Abraham Lin- 
coln, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute 
the office of President of the United States, and will, 
to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend 
the Constitution of the United States." 



CHAPTER XIV 

WAR BEGINS 

The day, which had opened fair, now became bleak. 
Buchanan drove with Lincoln from the Capitol to the 
White House, and there bade the new President good- 
by. As Lincoln entered into the possession of the bare 
and comfortless mansion that for four years — the rest 
of his life — was to be his home, he felt more keenly 
than ever the pang of loneliness that had been his most 
familiar experience. He soon found himself in the 
midst of a mob of the idly curious that roamed about 
the place as if it belonged to them. An army of office- 
seekers that already had begun to make his life a bur- 
den were camping there from daybreak until they were 
put out at night, watching eagerly for a chance inter- 
view and fairly thrusting their applications and petitions 
into his pockets. The trouble and anxiety that the 
approach of war had brought, bore heavily upon him. 
The persistency of the men who sought offices at his 
hands at this distressing time was so great that the 
President exclaimed, " I feel just like a man who is 
trying to rent out apartments in one end of his house 
while fire is raging in the other." 

There is no loneliness to compare with that of one 
who finds himself in the midst of a multitude from 
whom he is unable to escape and who will give him 
neither sympathy nor peace. The country was divided. 
The nation's arms had been sent to Southern forts and 
arsenals, and its soldiers to the far-away Indian fron- 
tier. The government service was in the hands of men 



94 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

whom he neither knew nor trusted. How many of them 
were at heart hostile to the Union, no one could tell. 
How soon the armies of the Confederate States might 
march across the Potomac and make the city of Wash- 
ington the capital of the new slave republic, he could 
only conjecture. He knew that the regular army of the 
United States had been scattered, and that there were 
only a few hundred soldiers in Washington to guard 
the capital. Its commander, General W infield Scott, 
was seventy-five years old and too feeble now for active 
service. Seven States, with seven millions of people, 
had declared their independence. The fate of the other 
slave States, particularly of Virginia and Maryland, 
within whose borders the city of Washington lay, hung 
in the balance. Every effort was being made at Rich- 
mond and at Baltimore, by Southern conspirators and 
those in sympathy with the slave Confederacy, to draw 
these two border States into the secession movement. 
There was only a faint hope that they might remain 
loyal to the Union. A rash word or an unwise step 
would drive Virginia and Maryland, and possibly Del- 
aware and Kentucky and Missouri, into the Confed- 
eracy, and plunge the country into war, and that, too, 
at a time when there were no troops at hand to defend 
the capital, and the government was without arms or 
ammunition or money or credit. 

This was the situation as President Lincoln saw it 
on the day he entered the White House. It was a time 
that called for patience and wisdom. He saw now still 
more clearly the truth of his prophetic words at Indian- 
apolis, that the question of preserving the liberties of 
the country was not with politicians, nor with office- 
seekers, nor with Presidents, but with the people. And 
he saw more clearly than any of his advisers that he 



WAR BEGINS 95 

could not hope to save the Union unless he could win 
the confidence of the people and command their help 
in all that he had to do. He resolved to treat the South 
with all possible patience, and to wait for the South to 
strike the first blow. Trusting the people as he did, he 
felt sure that if the South should fire on the flag, the 
North would unite to resist the attack. It is interesting 
to imagine in what different ways the other great men 
of that day would have met the difficulties that Lincoln 
settled with such wise forbearance ; how Seward would 
have declared war not only against the rebellious States, 
but against the European powers as well ; how Thaddeus 
Stevens would have proclaimed the slaves free from 
the very beginning and so lost the support of Delaware 
and Maryland and Kentucky and Missouri ; how Gen- 
eral Scott would have recognized the Confederacy as 
an independent nation ; and how Stephen A. Douglas 
would have gone boldly into the heart of the South and 
pronounced its leaders traitors worthy of death ; and 
how, in the plans of all these counselors who differed 
with Lincoln so often, there was a certainty of ruin, 
while the only hope of saving the Union proved to be in 
the slow and cautious policy of Lincoln, which permit- 
ted him to act only after he had learned all there was to 
be learned, and, after taking counsel, had made up his 
mind what course the people wanted him to pursue. 

The day after the inauguration brought him face to 
face with a question which he must soon answer. If he 
answered it in one way, the Union would be dissolved 
and the Constitution which he had just promised 
" to preserve, protect, and defend " would be set at 
naught ; if he answered it in the only other way, the 
South would declare war. 

Within a little island fortification in Charleston 



96 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Harbor, known as Fort Sumter, Major Robert Ander- 
son and a hundred and twenty-eight men upheld the 
authority of the national government, and from its 
flagstaff each day flung to the breeze the flag of the 
United States. They were really prisoners within its 
walls, for across the bay five thousand South Carolina 
soldiers under General Beauregard were encamped 
beneath the flag of the Palmetto State awaiting the 
command to open fire. Within the fort the provisions 
were almost gone. The governor of South Carolina had 
forbidden President Buchanan to come to Sumter's re- 
lief. But President Lincoln had said in his inaugural 
address that the power confided to him would be used 
" to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places 
belonging to the government," and that " the declared 
purpose of the Union " was " to defend itself." Fort 
Sumter belonged to the national government, and its 
men had reached a point where they must either desert 
their place of duty or face starvation. On March 5, 
President Lincoln received word from Major Anderson 
that there were only provisions enough to last a week, and 
that unless help came soon the fort must be abandoned. 
What was President Lincoln to do? Should he send 
food to Anderson and his men ? Or must the flag be 
hauled down ? 

Lincoln determined to find out if possible just what 
the feeling of the people of South Carolina was, and 
whether they would plunge the country into war rather 
than allow the handful of Union soldiers in Charleston 
Harbor to be fed. The President's former law partner, 
Ward H. Lamon, a Virginian by birth, offered to go to 
Charleston and see what the people there were likely 
to do if the President should make good his inaugural 
pledge of holding all "places belonging to the govern- 



WAR BEGINS 97 

ment." It was a dangerous journey. Secretary Seward 
tried to prevent it, insisting that Lamon could not 
come back alive ; and yet it was of the utmost impor- 
tance to know the whole situation at once. Lamon 
was eager to go, and the President said, " By Jing ! I '11 
risk him. Go, Lamon, and God bless you ! Bring back a 
palmetto if you can't bring good news." Lamon went. 
He soon learned the temper of the South, and reported 
to the President all that he had discovered. Lincoln 
then put to each member of the cabinet this question : 
" Assuming it to be possible to now provision Fort 
Sumter, under all the circumstances is it wise to attempt 
it ? " General Scott, the commander of the army, had 
already advised against it, and now all but one of the 
President's cabinet were agreeing with General Scott. 
In the face of this, the President determined to hold 
the fort. A vessel was made ready and sent to Charles- 
ton, and, according to promise, Governor Pickens was 
notified. 

Before the vessel containing food for the besieged 
men reached the harbor, General Beauregard ordered 
an attack on the little fort. For two days Major An- 
derson and his half-starved men kept up a brave but 
hopeless defense. At last the flag, torn by hostile bul- 
lets, was lowered. The little garrison, holding out as 
long as it could without food or ammunition, surren- 
dered. A new and strange banner was raised over 
Sumter. " And the war came." 

On Sunday morning, April 14, 1861, the news 
flashed to every village in the land, " Sumter has been 
fired on. Sumter has fallen." From that moment the 
flag of the Union, that had been only a decoration, 
became a sacred thing, that brought tears to men's eyes 
as they saw it outlined against the sky. 



98 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

The next morning the President issued a proclama- 
tion calling for seventy-five thousand troops and con- 
vening a special session of Congress to meet on July 4. 
In this proclamation he said : " I appeal to all loyal 
citizens to . . . aid this effort to maintain the honor, 
the integrity, and the existence of our ' National Union ' 
and the perpetuity of popular government, and to 
redress wrongs already long enough endured." Many 
loyal men of the country responded instantly. Within 
a week, camps were established and men and boys from 
every station in life were taking their first lessons in 
military science and getting ready to fight for the flag. 
The streets in every city echoed the tramp of marching 
men, and every wind carried to anxious ears the rattle 
of the drum and the scream of the bugle. And so was 
created the volunteer army which, before peace came 
again, numbered nearly three millions of men. 

The war, long threatened, had begun ; and of the army 
of the Union, soon to become the greatest army that 
the world ever knew, Abraham Lincoln, whose military 
training had been confined to an eight weeks' campaign 
against Indians that he never saw, became the com- 
mander-in-chief. 

The news that Fort Sumter had fallen put an end 
at once to party differences in the North. Democrats 
and Republicans forgot politics and became Union 
men. Stephen A. Douglas, Senator from Illinois, and 
both in Congress and among the people the leader of 
the Democratic party, hurried to the White House to 
offer his help to President Lincoln in putting down 
the rebellion. It was the one thing that the President 
needed most. Lincoln and Douglas, rivals no longer 
but loyal friends, spent three hours together on that 
fateful Sunday evening planning to save the Union. 



WAR BEGINS 99 

Senator Douglas gave to the newspapers as soon as 
he left the White House the information that " Mr. 
Douglas called on the President this evening and had 
an interesting conversation on the present condition 
of the country. The substance of the conversation was 
that . . . Mr. Douglas . . . was prepared to sustain 
the President in the exercise of all his constitutional 
functions to preserve the Union, and maintain the 
government, and defend the federal capital." From 
that meeting, the last that ever took place between 
the two friends, Douglas went to Illinois to rally the 
people of that State, and especially the Democrats, to 
Lincoln's support. To the legislature on April 25, 
1861, he made his last great public address, for he 
died a few weeks later. " Whenever our government 
is assailed," he declared, " the shortest way to peace is 
the most stupendous preparation for war." He closed 
by saying : " It is with a sad heart, with a grief that 
I have never before experienced, that I have to con- 
template this fearful struggle ; but I believe, in my 
conscience, that it is a duty we owe to ourselves, our 
children, and our God, to protect this government and 
that flag from every assailant, be he who he may." 

It was the last message of a great man. Its effect 
was instantaneous. Not only in Illinois, but through- 
out the North, the men of the nation gave evidence to 
their President that they would stand by him and 
defend the Union until the flag should float in peace 
over every foot of soil. 



CHAPTER XV 

a people's sorrow 

The attack on Fort Sumter was a call to arms, 
South as well as North. The chief difference was that 
it found the South ready, while it took the North by 
surprise. Southern orators charged that in sending 
bread to Sumter, Lincoln had " invaded sacred soil " 
and was trying to " coerce " a sovereign State. On 
April 17, Virginia, by the vote of a bare majority, 
joined the Confederacy ; and in May Tennessee, also 
by a close vote, and Arkansas and North Carolina fol- 
lowed. The Confederate States of America, eleven in 
number, with Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as Presi- 
dent, and Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia as Vice- 
President, had organized what they dreamed would 
become a new republic, with the right to buy and sell 
and hold human beings as slaves under national pro- 
tection as its chief principle of government, and the 
fear of losing that right through Lincoln's election its 
only reason for being. 

The Confederate leaders had hoped to unite all the 
slave States, but they were doomed to disappointment. 
Maryland and Kentucky and Missouri remained loyal, 
although among their citizens many showed their sym- 
pathy with the South by enlisting and marching witli 
" the boys in gray." To keep these border States loyal 
was Lincoln's constant purpose, while many were the 
efforts to break them away from his firm yet sympa- 
thetic hold. 

The different States, in proportion to their popula- 



A PEOPLE'S SORROW 101 

tion, began at once to organize their soldiers into regi- 
ments and put them under the command of the Presi- 
dent, to be trained for war. To the city of Washing- 
ton, defenseless on the Virginia border, the first troops 
hastened, reaching the capital four days after the 
President's call went forth. The city was practically 
in a state of siege. Barricades of all kinds had been 
put up about the public buildings. Famine was threat- 
ening, and the people were in terror lest a few of the 
Southern regiments, already in camp and awaiting 
marching orders, should move against the city. Wait- 
ing through the weary night for the Massachusetts and 
New York regiments to reach Washington, Lincoln 
walked the corridors of the White House alone, repeat- 
ing to himself the despairing cry, " Why don't they 
come ? Why don't they come ? " 

The conduct of the war presented many problems to 
the President and his military advisers. The Confeder- 
ate coast-line from the Potomac to the Mexican bor- 
der, many thousands of miles long, was blockaded, and 
had to be watched to prevent the South from getting 
provisions or arms or relief from abroad. The border- 
line of Virginia and Tennessee and Arkansas must 
be guarded lest injury be done to the Northern cities, 
particularly Washington and Baltimore and Philadel- 
phia. The Mississippi River, with the Ohio opening 
the way into the great Middle West, must be patrolled 
by war-boats and guarded by forts and military camps. 
With the same vigilance must they watch the Potomac 
on the east and the Cumberland and the Tennessee 
rivers on the west. At all hazards Washington, the 
national capital, must be kept in safety. 

Three general fields of military activity seemed to 
open : the capture of Richmond, the new Confederate 



102 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

capital; the establishment, through the army, of the 
federal authority among the loyal Union people of east- 
ern Tennessee by way of the Tennessee River ; and 
the capture of the Confederate fortifications along the 
Mississippi, so as to open the " Father of Waters " to 
free passage by Union vessels. To carry out this plan 
of warfare required the building-up and training of a 
larger army than the world had yet known. It required 
four years in camp and on the march, on the battle- 
field, in attack, and on retreat, until the South, whose 
troops were fewer and whose wealth was less, should 
at last be worn out and cry, " Enough." 

The story of the four years of waiting and fighting 
cannot be told here. Lincoln, as commander-in-chief of 
army and navy and President of the United States, 
had it all to oversee and direct. The sorrows it brought 
were his sorrows, and its hourly cares and anxieties 
were his. 

One member of the little party that had traveled 
with Lincoln from Springfield to Washington was 
young Elmer Ellsworth, who, when the war broke out, 
was made colonel of a regiment of zouaves. While 
passing through Alexandria, Virginia, with his regi- 
ment, Colonel Ellsworth saw a Confederate flag float- 
ing from the roof of a hotel. He dashed up the stairs 
and, tearing the flag from its staff, started back to the 
street. On the stairway he was shot and killed. The 
reckless courage he had shown and the cruelty of his 
untimely death made the men of the North still more 
eager to fight for the flag for whose honor Colonel 
Ellsworth had died. 

When the President was aroused in the early dawn 
and told the news, he stood by the window in silence 
looking across the Potomac toward Alexandria, while 



A PEOPLE'S SORROW 103 

the tears streamed down his face. Turning toward the 
bearers of the heart-breaking tidings he said slowly : 
" So this is the beginning — murder ! Ah, my friends, 
what shall the end be ? " On the next day, in the midst 
of his overwhelming labors, he found time to write with 
his own hand this letter to the father and mother whose 
boy had been killed : — 

May 25, 1861. 

My dear Sir and Madam, — In the untimely loss of 
your noble son, our affliction here is scarcely less than your 
own. So much of promised usefulness to one's country, and 
of bright hopes for one's self and friends, have rarely been 
so suddenly dashed as in his fall. In size, in years, and in 
youthful appearance a boy only, his power to command men 
was surpassingly great. This power, combined with a fine 
intellect, an indomitable energy, and a taste altogether mil- 
itary, constituted in him, as seemed to me, the best natural 
talent in that department I ever knew. 

And yet he was singularly modest and deferential in social 
intercourse. My acquaintance with him began less than two 
years ago ; yet through the latter half of the intervening 
period it was as intimate as the disparity of our ages and my 
engrossing engagements would permit. To me he appeared 
to have no indulgences or pastimes; and I never heard him 
utter a profane or an intemperate word. What was conclu- 
sive of his good heart, he never forgot his parents. The honors 
he labored for so laudably, and for which in the sad end he 
so gallantly gave his life, he meant for them no less than for 
himself. 

In the hope that it may be no intrusion upon the sacred- 
ness of your sorrow, I have ventured to address you this 
tribute to the memory of my young friend and your brave 
and early fallen child. 

May God give you that consolation which is beyond all 
earthly power. 

Sincerely your friend in a common affliction, 

A. Lincoln. 



104 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

This was the first of a great number of personal 
griefs that the war brought upon Lincoln. A few 
months later, Colonel Edward D. Baker, the friend 
who had introduced him at the inauguration, was killed 
in battle at Ball's Bluff. As there came to the Presi- 
dent from day to day the news of defeat and disaster 
on many battlefields, it found him overborne by the 
sorrow of the people and bearing the suffering of others 
upon a heart already heavy with its own grief. When 
the report of a battle was looked for, he would wait all 
through the night for news of the outcome, or hurry 
through the darkness to the telegraph-office in the War 
Department Building to learn the news and talk it over 
with his advisers. To him the report of a battle was the 
story of so many of his own people, his friends, who 
were suffering in his service. When he heard of a sol- 
dier's death, he thought first of what that death meant 
at home, and in every way he could, he tried to make 
the sorrow of it easier to bear. 

Most of the soldiers who fought for the Union were 
mere boys. Many of their colonels and generals were 
less than thirty years old. In the heart of the President 
they were his boys in blue, whom he loved as he loved 
his own Robert and Willie and Tad ; and in their hearts 
he was the " Father Abraham " for whom they prayed, 
and to whom they sang their rallying song, " We are 
coming, Father Abraham." 

He went to the hospitals so often to cheer the 
wounded that the high officials thought he was neglect- 
ing the business of his office. A story is told of his 
stopjnng beside a young soldier's death -bed to write 
a last letter to the father and mother of the boy. At 
the foot of the brave little note he added as a sort of 
comfort to the sufferer, " This letter was written by 



A PEOPLE'S SORROW 105 

Abraham Lincoln," and as he turned to leave, asked 
if he could do anything more. The hoy reached a 
trembling hand toward him and said : " I won't live 
over an hour or two. Can't you hold my hand until it 's 
all over ? " 

When the army was in camp in northern Virginia, 
he found comfort in visiting the boys and watching 
them drill, and when in the fortune of war they came 
to the Washington hospitals, wasted with disease or 
broken with wounds, he visited them there and brought 
them the comfort of a father's gentle touch and cheer- 
ing word. 

He wrote many letters of sympathy to friends and 
sometimes to strangers to whom the war had brought 
some personal loss. In one of these letters he said to 
the daughter of a friend who had died : — 

Dear Fanny, — In this sad world of ours sorrow comes 
to all, and to the young it comes with hittered agony because 
it takes them unawares. The older have learned ever to ex- 
pect it. . . . You cannot now realize that you will ever feel 
better. Is not this so ? And yet it is a mistake. You are 
sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly 
true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had 
experience enough to know what 1 say, and you need only 
to helieve it to feel better at once. The memory of your 
dear father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad, sweet feel- 
ing in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have 
known before. 

Your sincere friend, 

A. Lincoln. 

To a mother whose five sons had died for their coun- 
try he wrote this letter : — 

Dear Madam, — I have been shown in the files of the 
War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of 
Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have 



106 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and 
fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt 
to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. 
But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation 
that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died 
to save. I pray that our heavenly Father may assuage the 
anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished 
memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that 
must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar 
of freedom. 

Yours very sincerely and respectfully, 

Abraham Lincoln. 

When, after a year of the horrors of war, death en- 
tered his own household and took his eight-year-old boy 
Willie, his nature changed greatly. The lines of care 
deepened about his eyes and mouth. In a few months 
he had grown to be an old man. He slept scarcely at 
all. Those who saw him from day to day said that his 
was the saddest face they had ever seen. To one of 
his associates he once said, " I shall never be happy 
ao-ain." 



CHAPTER XVI 

PRESIDENT LINCOLN AT HOME 

It would be a mistake to believe that President 
Lincoln allowed sorrow to overwhelm him. He had 
learned through long experience to meet it with a smil- 
ing face. There were times when no one else dared to 
be either hopeful or happy. His stoiues and his jokes 
were the despair of his counselors. " Why can't the 
President be serious?" they exclaimed in their impa- 
tience. Because he interrupted a council of state to 
tell a story or read a page that he thought funny from 
" Artemus Ward, His Book," shallow men called him 
heartless. " I tell you," he said, " I simply must do it. 
If I could not laugh, I should die. It is my safety- 
valve." 

Life in the White House had little privacy. During 
the first three years the conduct of the war was directed 
from there. In the White House the cabinet held its 
meetings, to agree, and quite as often to disagree, over 
what should be done. To the White House came letters 
and telegrams by the thousand, from people in distress, 
from applicants for office, from politicians, inventors, 
abolitionists, and " cranks." Men came with schemes 
for ending the war or for enriching themselves. Those 
with grievances sought the President for redress. Fa- 
vors and privileges of all sorts were demanded. But 
most of all, and at all hours of the day and night, came 
appeals for the pardon of unhappy soldiers condemned 
to death for sleeping on duty or for running away from 
military service. The President had given strict orders 



108 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

to turn no one back who came with appeals for a soldier's 
life ; and against the protest of the head of the army 
he granted innumerable prayers of this sort, giving as 
his excuse, " I believe this boy can serve his country 
better living than dead." 

Most of the demands upon him were unnecessary, 
for people in difficulty naturally turned to him as the 
only person who would hear them. One instance is 
told of a Kentuckian who demanded the President's 
help to reclaim a runaway slave. With such a request 
at such a time Lincoln had no patience. " You remind 
me," he exclaimed, " of a small boy on a St. Law- 
rence steamer. Just as they were in the midst of the 
rapids at the most dangerous point, the boy rushed 
to the pilot and said, ' Say, Mr. Captain, I wish 
you would stop this boat ; I 've lost my apple over- 
board.' " 

The President was very fond of John Hay, his young 
secretary, who lived in the White House, and who saved 
him from many an unpleasant meeting, and from many 
a wearing duty. In the long sleepless nights the Presi- 
dent was wont to court rest from his anxieties by going 
across the White House in his night-clothes to sit on 
the edge of John Hay's bed and read to him for hours 
at a time from Shakespeare's plays or from the poems 
of Holmes and Hood and Burns. 

The Lincoln boys, eight and ten years old, went 
wherever they liked about the building, bursting into 
the cabinet-room while affairs of vast importance were 
under discussion, and climbing over their good-natured 
father's giant frame as if it were their play-hour and 
the austere Secretary of War and his fellow statesmen 
were intruders. Mr. Hay has told of the comradeship 
that prevailed between Lincoln and his two younger 



PRESIDENT LINCOLN AT HOME 109 

sons. " The two little boys, with their Western inde- 
pendence and enterprise, kept the house in an uproar. 
They drove their tutor wild with their good-natured 
disobedience : they organized a minstrel show in the 
attic ; they made acquaintance with the office-seekers, 
and became the hot champions of the distressed. Tad 
was a merry, warm-blooded, kindly little boy, perfectly 
lawless, and full of odd fancies. . . . Sometimes, escap- 
ing from the domestic authorities, he would take refuge 
in that sanctuary [his father's office] for the whole 
evening, dropping to sleep at last on the floor, when the 
President would pick him up and carry him tenderly 
to bed." 

Once, when hope of success for the Union cause 
seemed far away, the President issued a proclamation 
setting apart a day of fasting and prayer, and asking 
" all the people to abstain on that day from their or- 
dinary secular pursuits and to unite, at their several 
places of worship and their respective homes, in keep- 
ing the day holy to the Lord." When little Tad Lin- 
coln was told that this meant going without food for a 
whole day, he began to be afraid that he might starve. 
For some days before the fast-day, and with the utmost 
secrecy, he busied himself with hiding in the carriage- 
house scraps of food from the table and the kitchen. 
The discovery of his storehouse of provisions enraged 
the small boy, but amused his father greatly. " If he 
grows to be a man," the President said with a laugh, 
" Tad will be what the women all dote on — a good 
provider." 

One of the President's secretaries has described the 
part Tad took in one of his father's White House 
speeches. " From a point of concealment behind the 
window drapery, I held a light while he read, drop- 



110 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ping the pages of his written speech, one by one, upon 
the floor as he finished them. Little Tad . . . scram- 
bled around on the floor, importuning his father to 
give him ' another paper,' as he collected the sheets of 
paper fluttering from the President's hand. Outside 
was a vast sea of faces, illuminated by the lights that 
burned in the festal array of the White House, and 
stretching far out into the misty darkness." 

On another occasion, when Secretary Stanton play- 
fully made Tad a lieutenant in the army, Tad threw 
the White House into an uproar by assuming full 
military authority. He had a lot of firearms sent over, 
discharged the guard, mustered all the house-servants, 
drilled them with the muskets, and put them on guard. 
When the confusion he had created was reported to 
President Lincoln, he treated it as a joke, sent Tad 
to bed, and then relieved the novel guardsmen from 
duty. 

The Lincoln children's dogs and cats and goats 
seemed to get their share of the busy President's 
thoughts. When there were new puppies or kittens in 
the family, he announced it in all seriousness to his 
visitors. When Tad was away with his mother, tele- 
grams kept the boy posted as to the welfare of his 
pets. In one of these dispatches the President said, 
" Tell Tad the goats and father are. very well, espe- 
cially the goats." In one of his letters to Mrs. Lin- 
coln he wrote : " Tell dear Tad poor ' Nanny goat ' is 
lost and Mrs. Cuthbert and I are in distress about it. 
The day you left, Nanny was found resting herself and 
chewing her little cud on the middle of Tad's bed ; 
but now she 's gone. The gardener kept complaining 
that she destroyed the flowers, till it was concluded to 
bring her down to the White House. . . . The second 




LINCOLN AND TAI> 



PRESIDENT LINCOLN AT HOME ill 

day she disappeared and has not been heard of since. 
This is the last we know of poor Nanny." In a later 
dispatch he telegraphed his wife, " All well, includ- 
ing Tad's pony and the goats." 

Once in a while the boys would succeed in enticing 
their father into the grounds, where they would play 
ball with him, and in high glee keep him running the 
bases with his giant strides. For the children he was 
willing to do anything. 

, A boy of thirteen had displayed unusual courage 
in the gunboat service and sought the President's help 
in getting into the Naval Academy. He bowed to the 
President and began to tell his story when he was 
interrupted by Mr. Lincoln's hearty, " Bless me ! 
is that the boy who did so gallantly in those two 
great battles? Why, I feel that I should bow to him 
and not he to me." When the President found the 
boy was a few months too young to have his wish, 
he put his hand affectionately on his shoidder and 
said to him : " Now, my boy, go home and have good 
fun until fall. It is about the last holiday you will 
get." 

Another boy of thirteen had been a drummer and 
had lost his place because he had offended his colonel. 
Sick and disheartened, he was waiting to see if the 
President would not give him another chance. Lincoln 
asked him where he lived and who his parents were. 
" I have no mother, no father, no brothers, no sisters, 
and no friends — nobody cares for me." The Presi- 
dent wrote on a card an order " to care for this poor 
boy," and sent him away happy. 

Through all the years, with the wisdom and foresight 
of a statesman, he had kept the childlike spirit. The 
little children, who knew nothing of his trials, came to 



112 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

him for help and comfort as freely as if he belonged to 
them. 

In the crowds that hung about the doorway of his 
private office the woman who brought a baby with her 
always managed to get a hearing. The little folk who 
attended his receptions he singled out for some special 
word of kindness, stopping the rapidly moving proces- 
sion until he could take a baby into his arms, or " shake 
hands with this little man." A boy of seven, who was 
brought to the White House and introduced to Mr. 
Lincoln as the son of one of the great Union generals, 
remembers with what tenderness the tall President 
laid a tired hand on his head as he said : " My boy, I 
hope you will live to be as good a man as I know your 
father is." 

At one of the big receptions three timid little girls 
followed the long line of visitors to where Mr. Lincoln 
stood, and then suddenly lost their courage. The Presi- 
dent noticed them and called out, " Little girls, are you 
going to pass me without shaking hands ? " 

To one of the youngsters at Springfield whose state- 
ment that he had talked to Abraham Lincoln had been 
disputed, the President found time to write : — 

Executive Mansion, March 19, 1861. 
Whom it may concern : I did see and talk with George 
Evans Patten, last May, at Springfield, Illinois. 
Respectfully, 

A. Lincoln. 

This interest in the happiness of children Abraham 
Lincoln had always shown. He did not hesitate to 
sacrifice the dignity of his high place and the comfort 
and convenience of a very busy man to give pleasure to 
any child that needed him. 



PRESIDENT LINCOLN AT HOME 113 

In the old days, when Lincoln was one of the lead- 
ing- lawyers of the State, he noticed a little girl of 
ten who stood beside a trunk in front of her home cry- 
ing bitterly. He stopped to learn what was wrong, and 
was told that she was about to miss a long-promised 
visit to Decatur because the wagon had not come for 
her. " You need n't let that trouble you," was his cheer- 
ing reply. " Just come along with me and we shall 
make it all right." Lifting the trunk upon his shoulder, 
and taking the little girl by the hand, he went through 
the streets of Springfield a half-mile to the railway 
station, put her and her trunk on the train, and sent 
her away with a happiness in her heart that is still 
there. 

George Pickett, who had known Lincoln in Illinois, 
years before, joined the Southern army and by his 
conspicuous bravery and ability had become one of 
the great generals of the Confederacy. Toward the 
close of the war, when a large part of Virginia had 
fallen into the possession of the Union army, the 
President called at General Pickett's Virginia home. 
The general's wife, with her baby on her arm, met him 
at the door. She herself has told the story for us. 
" ' Is this George Pickett's home ? ' he asked. With 
all the courage and dignity I could muster I replied, 
' Yes, and I am his wife and this is his baby.' ' I am 
Abraham Lincoln.' ' The President ! ' I gasped. I had 
never seen him, but I knew the intense love and rev- 
erence with which my soldier always spoke of him. 
The stranger shook his head and replied, ' No ; Abra- 
ham Lincoln, George's old friend.' The baby pushed 
away from me and reached out his hands to Mr. Lin- 
coln, who took him in his arms. As he did so an ex- 
pression of rapt, almost divine tenderness and love 



114 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

lighted up the sad face. It was a look that I have never 
seen on any other face. The baby opened his mouth 
wide and insisted upon giving his father's friend a 
dewy kiss. As Mr. Lincoln gave the little one back to 
me he said, ' Tell your father, the rascal, that I forgive 
him for the sake of your bright eyes.' " 



CHAPTER XVII 

HIGH TIDE 

In the earlier years of Lincoln's life he believed that 
fate directed the affairs of men and determined their 
success or failure for them. But as he grew older, he 
came to feel that Providence had intrusted to him a 
great duty toward mankind, and that in some way, thus 
far undiscovered, he was to have a part in bringing 
freedom to the slaves. In the campaigns with Douglas, 
ambitious though he was, he found himself less inter- 
ested in his own personal success than he was in bring- 
ing the people to see the wickedness of slavery. When 
he came to the presidency it was with a feeling that 
it was God who had put upon him the burden of sav- 
ing the Union, and that the efforts of men and, least 
of all, his own efforts, had little to do with the results. 
To his mind the contest with slavery, and, later on, 
the war to save the Union, were a single death-struggle 
between right and wrong, in which he was chosen to 
execute God's will in God's own good time. It was for 
this reason that he gave no thought to his own safety, 
traveling unprotected except when Secretary Stanton 
forced a guard upon him, and when he made his visits 
to the front, walking unconcernedly within easy range 
of the Confederate guns. It was his faith that God 
would use him as long as he was needed, and would let 
him die whenever his work was finished. 

This attitude toward Providence he wrote down, in 
the fall of 1862, when there seemed to be no hope that 
war would come to an early end : " The will of God 



116 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in 
accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one 
must be, wrong'. God cannot be for and against the 
same thing at the same time. In the present Civil War 
it is quite possible that God's purpose is something dif- 
ferent from the purpose of either party ; and yet the 
human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are 
of the best adaptation to effect his purpose. I am almost 
ready to say that this is probably true ; that God wills 
this contest and wills that it shall not end yet. By His 
mere great power on the minds of the now contestants 
He could have either saved or destroyed the Union 
without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, 
having begun, He could give the final victory to either 
side any day. Yet the contest proceeds." 

During 1861 and 1862 the loyal States stood by 
him faithfully, sending troops by hundreds of thou- 
sands as rapidly as he called for them. Upon the ques- 
tion of freeing the slaves they continued to disagree. 
The war was a war to preserve the Union ; upon that 
all could stand together, Kentucky and Maryland and 
Missouri, as well as the free States of the North. But 
in the background the problem of what to do with 
the slaves loomed large. Hundreds of thousands of 
negroes in the South were helping the enemies of the 
Union, supporting the families of the soldiers in rebel- 
lion while their masters fought, and digging the trenches 
and building the fortifications to enable their masters 
to prolong the war. The time was rapidly approaching 
when this use of the slaves must be stopped. If only 
the President would set them free, men said, the end 
would soon come. But emancipation could not come so 
long as it would offend the loyal border States. Day 
by day the anti-slavery feeling grew stronger in the 



HIGH TIDE 117 

North, and day after day abolition committees and del- 
egations waited on the President to urge him to act. 
At the same time other loyal people just as earnestly 
warned him of the mischief that such a step would 
work. 

The President found a strong reason for emanci- 
pation in the effect it would have upon the feeling of 
England, for with all their sympathy with the South, 
the English were distinctly hostile to slavery. Lincoln 
knew that if ever the success of the South came to 
mean the perpetuation of slavery, English sympathy 
would shift toward the Union side. 

During the summer of 1862, it became plain that 
emancipation could not be put off much longer. The 
military necessity of taking from the enemy the power 
to use negro labor in aid of the rebellion became more 
and more evident, even to the loyal people on the bor- 
der. Lincoln, having made up his mind to free the 
slaves, kept his own counsel, waiting for the fit time to 
come, and bearing in silence the criticism of the anti- 
slavery people. 

To Horace Greeley, editor of the New Fork Tribune, 
who, under the title, " The Prayer of Twenty Millions," 
had printed a savage attack on him for delaying to free 
the slaves, he wrote : " I would save the Union. I 
would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. 
... If I could save the Union without freeing any 
slave, I would do it ; and if I could save it by freeing 
all the slaves, I would do it ; and if I could save it by 
freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do 
that. ... I have here stated my purpose according 
to my view of official duty ; and I intend no modifi- 
cation of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men 
everywhere could be free." 



118 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

This is the answer he made to a committee of church 
people who came to him to urge him to act : " I am 
approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, 
and that by religious men who are equally certain that 
they represent the divine will. ... I hope it will not 
be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that 
God would reveal His will to others on a point so con- 
nected with my duty, it might be supposed He would 
reveal it directly to me ; for, unless I am more deceived 
in myself than I often am, it is my earnest desire to 
know the will of Providence in this matter. And if I 
can learn what it is, I will do it." 

Meanwhile he had made his decision. He went into 
the cabinet meeting one July afternoon with a volume 
of Artemus Ward in his hand and commenced the 
deliberations by reading aloud a page of flippant non- 
sense that angered Secretaiy Stanton and seemed to 
the rest to be inexcusably out of place. Becoming sud- 
denly serious, he said : " When the rebel army was at 
Frederick, I determined as soon as it should be driven 
out of Maryland to issue a proclamation of emancipa- 
tion. I said nothing to any one : but I made the pro- 
mise to myself, and " — hesitating for a moment — " to 
my Maker. The rebel army is now driven out and I 
am going to fulfill that promise." 

In September there came a Union victory in the bat- 
tle of Antietam, and at once the Emancipation Procla- 
mation was published, giving freedom to all who should 
be slaves within the enemy's country on January 1, 
1 863. The proclamation closed with this prayer : "And 
upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice 
warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, 
I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the 
gracious favor of Almighty God." 



HIGH TIDE 119 

No sooner were the slaves in the Confederate States 
set free than it became necessary to organize negro 
regiments. Many in the North who had been slow to 
approve of emancipation opposed the arming of the 
black men. The feeling against it ran high in the North, 
while in the South, President Davis and the Confeder- 
ate Congress threatened the officers of negro regiments 
with death. To a Union mass meeting, held at Spring- 
field, Illinois, in August, 1863, the President sent a 
letter in which he explained the necessity for freeing 
the slaves and employing them as soldiers. " Peace," 
he wrote, " does not appear so distant as it did. I 
hope it will come soon, and come to stay ; and so come 
as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will 
then have been proved that among freemen there can 
be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet, 
and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose 
their case and pay the cost. And then there will be 
some black men who can remember that w T ith silent 
tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well- 
poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this 
great consummation, while I fear there will be some 
white ones unable to forget that with malignant heart 
and deceitful speech they strove to hinder it." 

On July 4, 1863, the. tide of war began to turn. 
The Union armies under General Grant, with the 
help of Farragut and Porter and their boats, cap- 
tured Vicksburg and opened the Mississippi, sepa- 
rating Louisiana and Arkansas and Texas from the 
Confederacy, and Lincoln announced, " The Father of 
Waters again goes unvexed to the sea." On the 
same clay, at Gettysburg, in southern Pennsylvania, 
General Lee and his army, who had marched into 
the North, were turned back toward Richmond. The 



ISO ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

free States never again echoed the tread of hostile 
armies. 

At the battle of Gettysburg, which lasted for three 
days, there had been killed, wounded, or missing over 
forty-three thousand men, the Union losses being greater 
than the Confederate. The battle-ground where the 
soldiers had been buried, almost as they fell, was set 
apart at once as a national cemetery. On November 
19, 1863, the dedication took place. Edward Everett 
delivered the oration. To Abraham Lincoln an invita- 
tion had been given to " set apart these grounds to 
their sacred use by a few appropriate remarks." The 
President came by train the day before. The speech 
was half written, and in his bedroom at Gettysburg he 
wrote the rest in pencil. A hundred thousand people 
had assembled in the cemetery, toward which in the 
morning the great procession moved slowly forward. 
Lincoln rode his horse with a dignity befitting the 
commander-in-chief of the nation's army. Mr. Ever- 
ett's address held the audience profoundly attentive 
from noon until two o'clock. A hymn was then sung 
whose spirit is expressed in the final stanza : — 

" We trust, O God, Thy gracious power 
To aid us in our darkest hour. 
This be our prayer, — Father, save 
A people's freedom from its grave. 
All praise to Thee ! " 

As the last words of the hymn, sung by a Baltimore 
chorus of a hundred voices, died away, Lincoln stepped 
forth with the sheets containing the little speech in 
his left hand. He spoke slowly, in a voice that, like the 
notes of a bugle, reached the farthest borders of the 
crowd. There was tenderness in the words : " The brave 
men, living 



HIGH TIDE 121 

crated it far above our poor power to add or detract. 
The world will little note nor long remember what we 
say here, but it can never forget what they did here." 
As he continued, " It is for us, the living, rather to 
be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they 
who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced," 
it was plain that the people to whose loyalty he had 
always trusted would prove faithful to the cause for 
which the honored dead had given " the last full mea- 
sure of devotion." 

The next summer peace seemed farther away than 
ever. The battle-line crept once more dangerously near 
to free territory. Impatient men, weary of Lincoln's 
caution, began to look about for some one for Presi- 
dent who would drive the armies unprepared to their 
destruction, while others, weary of the daily record 
of disaster, were in search of a candidate who would 
consent to a peace that meant disunion. 

A mass convention of all the dissatisfied Union men 
was held at Cleveland, Ohio, to denounce the Presi- 
dent's "imbecile policy in the conduct of the war," 
and nominate John C. Fremont to succeed him. In- 
stead of being a representative gathering of thousands 
of loyal citizens, it brought together only a few disap- 
pointed politicians and personal enemies of Mr. Lin- 
coln. To the President came a report of the affair as 
he sat with a group of friends at the White House. 
" How many people were at the meeting ? " he asked. 
" About four hundred," was the answer. He reached 
for the Bible that lay on his desk, and, turning to the 
first book of Samuel and the twenty-second chapter, 
read aloud : " And every one that was in distress, and 
every one that was in debt, and every one that was dis- 
contented, gathered themselves unto him ; and he be- 



122 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

came a captain over them : and there were with him 
about four hundred men." 

The Republicans made no nomination in 18G4, but 
the Union party, as it called itself, met at Baltimore 
and nominated Abraham Lincoln for President and 
Andrew Johnson of Tennessee for Vice-President. 
Many of the Democrats supported the Union ticket. 
The others nominated George B. McClellan for Pre- 
sident. 

In the fall, as the campaign went on, the Union 
began to win victories by sea and by land. Admiral 
Parragut captured Mobile, and Sherman took Atlanta. 
The effect on the campaign was stimulating. To use 
Lincoln's homely words, the people became convinced 
that " it would not do to swap horses while they were 
crossing the stream," and by a tremendous vote — 212 
to 21 — reelected Abraham Lincoln. He was serenaded, 
the night after the election, and in his reponse said: 
"The rebellion continues, and now that the election is 
over, may not all having a common interest reunite in 
a common effort to save our common country ? For my 
own part, I have striven and shall strive to avoid plac- 
ing any obstacle in the way. So long as I have been 
here I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man's 
bosom. While I am deeply sensible to the high com- 
pliment of a reelection, and duly grateful, as I trust, to 
Almighty God for having directed my countrymen 
to a right conclusion, as I think, for their own good, 
it adds nothing to my satisfaction that any other man 
may be disappointed or pained by the result." 



CHAPTER XVIII 



The reelection of Lincoln proved that the only way 
to peace, to a peace that would "come to stay " and be 
" worth the keeping in all future time," was to fight it 
out. To the Confederate army it gave the courage of 
despair, a courage that enabled brave men to die for a 
cause already lost ; to the Union soldiers it gave a con- 
fidence that made success secure. It was plain that the 
armies under Lee in Virginia and under Johnston in 
the Carolinas were struggling to put off the inevitable 
end. The opening of the Mississippi River, in 1863, 
had cut the South in two and put the Western States 
out of the contest. From the Tennessee River, General 
Sherman had fought his bloody way into the heart 
of Georgia and was now leading his victorious army 
" from Atlanta to the sea," thus separating the Gulf 
States from what was left of the Confederacy. Mean- 
while Grant was driving Lee, inch by inch, by " the 
road of death," back from' the Potomac and into the 
devastated South. The Confederacy was at bay. The 
end was in sight. 

On March 4, 1865, standing where, four years be- 
fore, he had sworn " to preserve, protect, and defend 
the Constitution," President Lincoln was inaugurated 
a second time. The four years of war had wrought 
great changes in the people and in the man. No mili- 
tary escort was needed this time to bring him to the 
Capitol, for he was now among friends. With little 
Tad beside him, he drove rapidly from the White House 



124 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

to the ceremony. In the parade and in the audience, 
for the first time in American history, a multitude of 
negroes, soldiers and civilians whom he had set free, 
were gathered to do him honor. The President, hag- 
gard and worn, stood before the people. He was sad- 
dened by his own cares and borne down by the burden 
of the nation's grief. He might have said, as Henry 
Ward Beecher did, " I am surrounded by those who 
are sorrowing almost unto death." 

As he arose, a deep silence fell upon the people. It 
was as if a prophet of the elder day were speaking 
the word of inspiration to the nation that his faith had 
saved. The sky had been overcast, but suddenly a 
burst of sunshine brought the giant figure into a glare 
of light, thrilling the speaker and giving to the people, 
as he thought, an omen of the triumph that was so 
near at hand. 

" The Almighty has his own purposes," he declared. 
" ' Woe unto the world because of offenses ! for it must 
needs be that offenses come ; but woe to that man by 
whom the offense cometh.' If we shall suppose that 
American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the 
providence of God, must needs come, but which, having 
continued through His appointed time, He now wills to 
remove, and that He gives to both North and South 
this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the 
offense came, shall we discern therein any departure 
from those divine attributes which the believers in a 
living God always ascribed to Him? Fondly do we 
hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty 
scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God 
wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the 
bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited 
toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn 



PEACE 125 

with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the 
sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it 
must be said, ' The judgments of the Lord are true 
and righteous altogether.' 

" With malice toward none ; with charity for all ; 
with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the 
right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in ; 
to bind up the nation's wounds ; to care for him who 
shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and 
his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish 
a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all 
nations." 

The change that the years of war had made in the 
President was noted by every one. " When I last saw 
him," Horace Greeley tells us, " I was struck by his 
haggard, care-fraught face, so different from the sunny, 
gladsome countenance he first brought from Illinois. 
I felt that his life hung by so slender a thread that 
any new access of trouble or excess of effort might 
suddenly close his career. . . . * The sunset of life ' was 
plainly looking out of his kindly eyes and gleaming 
from his weather-beaten visage." 

The weeks that followed brought no little happiness 
to the President. The Thirteenth Amendment passed 
Congress and was in a fair way to become a part of 
the Constitution. By it liberty was given to the slaves 
in the loyal States, as, by the President's Emancipa- 
tion Proclamation, liberty had already been given to 
the slaves within Confederate territory. The President 
took every opportunity to help in the adoption of this 
amendment. 

Late in March he took Tad with him to City Point 
in Virginia, where, as General Grant's guest, he could 
watch the movement of the armies. The last days of 



126 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

the struggle were no holiday for the tender-hearted 
President. As the news came, from hour to hour, of 
Lee's retreat and of the capture of Confederate pris- 
oners by thousands, he sent messages of joy to Wash- 
ington, while the reports of men wounded and men 
killed on either side deepened the lines of sadness in 
his face. He knew that, as in surgery, the most mer- 
ciful way to peace was to bring it quickly by sharp and 
decisive action. So when General Sheridan reported 
that, if the thing were pressed, he thought General Lee 
would surrender, he set himself grimly to the inevitable 
and telegraphed to Grant, " Let the thing be pressed." 

During the President's stay at City Point, Jefferson 
Davis and the Confederate officials gathered their 
papers together, left Richmond by night, and sought 
safety farther south. As they left, followed by all who 
were able to crowd into the railway coaches, some one 
set fire to the city, making the place even more deso- 
late than war had made it. Lee had only a few more 
days to fight and the end was at hand. 

Without military protection Lincoln led little Tad 
by the hand into the abandoned capital of the dying 
Confederacy. No triumphal entry like this is told in 
history. The negroes, free at last by his hand and by 
the ratification of war, crowded about him as he walked 
through their midst. Many proclaimed him "the great 
Messiah," and falling to the ground before him, tried 
to kiss his feet. It was a strange experience to this 
simple-minded man. " Don't kneel to me," he said. 
" That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and 
thank Him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy." 
But from their tender gratitude he was unable to 
escape. Barefooted, in the garb of slavery, they pur- 
sued him eagerh', singing hymns of worship in which 



PEACE 147 

" Massa Lincoln " bore quite as great a part as did 
the Lord of Hosts. Finally, he made them a speech: 
" My poor friends, you are free — free as air. Liberty 
is your birthright. But you must try to deserve it. 
. . . Learn the laws and obey them ; obey God's 
commandments and thank Him for giving you liberty, 
for to Him you owe all things." 

An accident to Secretary Seward called Lincoln to 
Washington earlier than he had wished. On Saturday, 
the 8th of April, he left City Point by boat, by way of 
the Potomac, for Washington. Confident that within 
a few hours the surrender of General Lee would bring 
the peace for which he had so long prayed, he was able 
for a time to forget the cares of state as he read aloud 
from the tragedy of Macbeth. 

Many were now beginning to abandon the Confed- 
erate cause. In Richmond, during the President's brief 
stay, a movement had been started, with his help, for 
the withdrawal of the Virginia troops from the Con- 
federate army and the repeal of Virginia's ordinance 
of secession. But it came to nothing. 

The prospect of an immediate end to the war brought 
the President and Congress face to face with the grav- 
est political questions the country has ever had to solve. 
How should the Union be restored ? Should Jefferson 
Davis and his associates be arrested and punished for 
treason, or should they be received into citizenship, to 
take part again in the administration of a government 
they had sought to destroy ? Should the policy toward 
the leaders in the rebellion be one of revenge, of pun- 
ishment, or of pardon ? Northern sentiment was di- 
vided. In the bitterness of spirit to which the war and 
its losses had given birth, many found it hard to forgive 
the men who, by the attack on Fort Sumter, had plunged 



128 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

the country into war. Many, too, found fault with Presi- 
dent Lincoln because he felt that the South had suf- 
fered enough, and that the victors in the awful strug- 
gle should yield to the command of Scripture, "Judge 
not, that ye be not judged." Some of the bitter parti- 
sans in the North, including Vice-President Andrew 
Johnson, were opposing any settlement with the de- 
feated Confederates which would permit the pardon of 
their leaders and the restoration to the States of their 
political rights as a part of the restored Union. The 
President was not one of these. For the prostrate South 
he had no word of bitterness. He was a stranger to 
hate. 

As he had exposed himself day after day to dangers 
of all sorts, the fear for his safety increased. When he 
was approaching Washington Mrs. Lincoln said to him, 
" The city is filled with our enemies." But Lincoln ex- 
claimed, " Enemies ! We must never speak of that ! " 
The President was a constant visitor to the hospitals 
where the wounded from both armies were being cared 
for by the women of the North. On one of these visits 
an attendant tried to turn him aside by saying, " Those 
patients are rebels." But he answered gently, " Not 
rebels, — Confederates." 

Peace came at last. On Sunday, the 9th of April, 
General Lee surrendered at Appomattox, and with the 
help of Grant, whose generosity in victory had won the 
admiration of the South, and of Lincoln, whose sym- 
pathy for the South in its distress had won the hearts 
of many of his former enemies, he was now ready to 
" bind up the nation's wounds." 

When the news from Appomattox reached Wash- 
ington, the cabinet was in session at the White House. 
At Lincoln's bidding they all knelt in silent prayer. 



PEACE 129 

Outside, men, women, and children thronged the pub- 
lic places. For the first time the voice of the cannon 
proclaimed good will to men. Bands played in all the 
streets. From Sunday until Friday the celebration 
continued. In the South, the boys in gray, no longer 
soldiers, were glad that with the return of peace they 
could go back to the hard work for which they were 
already eager and to the homes where, among those 
they loved, they could recount the story of their strug- 
gle to uphold a hopeless cause. 

After the flight from Richmond, Jefferson Davis 
and his high officials had become fugitives. Advice 
was sought of President Lincoln regarding their cap- 
ture and punishment. He did not seem interested. He 
merely told a story and suggested that if only it could 
be managed so that these persons could escape " unbe- 
knownst" to him, it would save a lot of trouble. 

In the White House grounds on Tuesday evening, by 
a common impulse, the happy crowds gathered, eager 
for a speech from the President. They loved to listen 
to him, and they wanted to hear what he would say 
about the South. As the war drew near its close, he 
had been seeking a plan that would secure forever the 
results of the war, freedom and union, and, at the same 
time, bring about the fulfillment of the hope he had 
expressed at his first inauguration, that " the mystic 
chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and 
patriot grave would yet swell the chorus of the Union." 
The time had indeed come to " bind up the nation's 
wounds." To Abraham Lincoln this meant above all 
else generosity toward a defeated enemy. He stood at 
the open window while he made plain to the crowd his 
plan for restoring the old relations between the States, 
upon terms that no enemy of the South would have 



130 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

dreamed of offering. As the bands played patriotic 
airs, the President called for " Dixie," explaining" to 
the people that the Attorney-General had looked into 
the question and had decided that " Dixie " was now 
a national air by right of conquest. 

On Thursday night he had a strange dream that had 
come to him just before each of the great victories of 
the war. He dreamed that he was in a mysterious ves- 
sel, drifting silently, rapidly, toward an unknown shore. 
He told the dream to his cabinet ministers and to 
General Grant the next morning, assuring them as he 
told it that they would soon have news of the sur- 
render of Johnston's army, the only remnant of the 
Confederate forces still in arms. 

The arrival of General Grant at Washington aroused 
popular enthusiasm to its highest pitch, and brought 
thousands to the city to see the great commander for 
the first time. It was arranged and advertised that, on 
Friday evening, Grant was to go with the President 
and occupy a box at Ford's Theatre. The city was 
full of strangers, many of them still hostile to the 
Union. The intensity of the war feeling led the 
authorities to fear for the safety of Grant and Lincoln, 
if they should appear in public together. At the 
last moment Grant declined the invitation. The Presi- 
dent did not want to go, but was loath to disap- 
point the people. With Mrs. Lincoln and two guests 
he entered the State Box at Ford's Theatre at about 
nine o'clock. For a moment the play was stopped. The 
audience rose to its feet, cheering and waving hats and 
handkerchiefs and flags, while the orchestra played 
" Hail to the Chief." 

The evening wore on. The tired President, happy 
to foro-et his anxieties for an hour, became absorbed in 



PEACE 131 

the play. Presently a young man slipped noiselessly 
into the President's box, held a pistol to Lincoln's 
head, and fired. An instant later, the assassin leaped to 
the stage and disappeared. All night long it rained 
dismally. The startled nation dumbly waited for the 
news that came in the early morning. In a forlorn little 
room into which he had been carried from the theatre, 
Abraham Lincoln lay dead. 

In the camps of the Union armies and throughout 
the North on that Saturday morning, the joy that 
peace had brought was turned to grief. Every home 
in the North was widowed, and even the little children 
cried in their sorrow. It was as if one might say, as 
was said in the midnight of Egypt's sorrow, " There 
was not a house where there was not one dead." 

Of a great ruler who gave up his life for his people, 
three centuries ago, it was said as we may say of 
Abraham Lincoln : " He went through life bearing the 
load of a people's sorrows upon his shoulders, with a 
smiling face. . . . While he lived he was the guiding 
star of a whole brave nation ; and when he died the 
little children cried in the streets." 



O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN! 

O Captain ! my Captain ! our fearful trip is done, 

The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is 

won, 
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, 
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring ; 
But O heart ! heart ! heart ! 

O the bleeding drops of red, 
Where on the deck my Captain lies, 
Fallen cold and dead. 



132 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Captain ! my Captain ! rise up and hear the bells ; 

Rise up — for you the nag is flung — for you the bugle trills, 

For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths — for you the shores 

a-crowding, 
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning ; 
Here Captain ! dear father ! 

This arm beneath your head ! 

It is some dream that on the deck 

You 've fallen cold and dead. 

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, 
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, 
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, 
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won : 
Exult O shores, and ring O bells ! 

But I with mournful tread, 
Walk the deck my Captain lies, 
Fallen cold and dead. 

Walt Whitman. 



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